What Intra-Jewish Fragmentation Has in Common with the Wars That Nearly Destroyed Western Civilization — and the One Solution That Worked

Israel does not have a conflict between Judaism and the state. It has a conflict between competing Judaisms over which one the state will validate, fund, enforce, and embody.

The Haredi community is not fighting secular Israelis over whether Israel should be Jewish. It is fighting over whose Judaism defines what Jewish means. The Religious Zionist settler movement is not fighting the Supreme Court over whether the Land matters to the Jewish people. It is fighting over whether democratic law or divine command has higher standing when the two conflict. Secular Israeli Jews are not fighting to secularize their country. Many of them are fighting to preserve a vision of Jewish collective life — pluralist, democratic, continuous with the best of Jewish ethical tradition — that they believe the dominant coalition is dismantling.

These are not fights between Judaism and its enemies. They are fights within Judaism, among Jews, about what Judaism requires of a Jewish state. They are, in structure and in dynamic, almost exactly the fights that nearly destroyed European civilization between 1618 and 1648, and that the American founders studied with meticulous care before building the one institutional framework that has ever successfully managed them.

That framework was not built by people who wanted to drive religion out of public life. It was built by deeply religious people — Baptist ministers, Presbyterian elders, evangelical congregations — who had been persecuted by other Christians and who understood, from bitter institutional experience, that the most dangerous thing that can happen to authentic religious life is for the state to decide which version of it is correct.

Israel is about to learn this lesson. The only question is whether it learns it the way the Baptists did — through political organizing and constitutional architecture — or the way the Protestants of the Thirty Years’ War did, which is to say through catastrophe.

THE SAME DRIVES, A DIFFERENT LANGUAGE

In October 1517, Martin Luther posted his ninety-five theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg and inadvertently detonated a century of intra-Christian warfare. Luther was not trying to destroy the Church. He was trying to reform it from within, to correct what he saw as corruptions of authentic Christian teaching. He was, in his own understanding, defending true Christianity against a false version that had captured institutional authority.

Within a generation, there were dozens of Protestant communities, each claiming to represent authentic Christianity, each with different answers to the same questions: How should the community be governed? Who has the authority to interpret scripture? What does God require of political life? The institutional framework that had managed Christian religious conflict — the Catholic Church’s monopoly on legitimate spiritual authority — had been shattered. What replaced it was not pluralism. It was competition. Violent, existential, civilizationally costly competition over which community’s answer to those questions would hold state power.

The Thirty Years’ War — fought from 1618 to 1648 primarily among Christian communities disputing which confession would govern the German principalities — killed somewhere between a quarter and a third of the population of central Europe. It was not a war between Christianity and its enemies. It was a war among Christians who agreed on the centrality of their faith and disagreed, lethally, about which institutional expression of that faith deserved state authority.

Now read the State of Israel’s current political crisis through this lens.

Israeli Jewish society is not a monolith. It is a community fractured along lines that are as deep, as theologically charged, and as politically consequential as the rifts that split Protestant Christianity in the sixteenth century. The Haredi world, the Religious Zionist world, the traditional Mizrahi world, the secular Ashkenazi world, the liberal Jewish pluralist world — these are not merely political constituencies with different policy preferences. They are communities with incompatible accounts of what Judaism is, what it requires, and what a Jewish state should therefore look like.

The Haredi community understands Jewish authenticity as inseparable from Torah study, halakhic observance, and the authority of the great rabbinical decisors. Its relationship to Zionism has always been complicated — many of its founding streams were anti-Zionist on theological grounds, and its current accommodation with the Israeli state is structured around a transactional arrangement: state funding for yeshivot, exemption from military service, rabbinical jurisdiction over personal status law, in exchange for political support for whatever coalition will maintain those arrangements. The Haredi community does not claim that its vision of Judaism is one legitimate option among several. It claims that it is the only authentic version, and that its communal life must be protected from contamination by other visions.

The Religious Zionist settler community understands Jewish authenticity as inseparable from the Land — that the return to Eretz Yisrael is not merely a political project but a divinely commanded fulfillment of prophetic promise, that the settlement enterprise is a religious obligation, and that political arrangements — including democratic elections and Supreme Court decisions — that conflict with this theological conviction lack ultimate legitimacy. This community does not believe it is one political party among several. It believes it is acting on God’s instructions.

Secular Israeli Jews — themselves far from homogeneous — understand Jewish authenticity differently, but many of them understand it with equal depth of conviction. Many secular Israelis carry a Jewish identity that is national, cultural, ethical, and historically continuous with Jewish civilization without being observant in the Orthodox sense. Many of them understand........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)