The Diaspora is not a branch of Israel. Israel is one historical configuration of Jewish endurance: powerful, consequential and tragic, but neither prior to Jewish existence as a whole nor entitled to administer its boundaries. American, French, British, Argentine and South African Judaism do not receive their Jewishness from Jerusalem. They are not provincial variations of a central Israeli norm. They possess their own institutions, memories, languages, religious rhythms, internal disputes and ways of transmitting Jewish life across generations.

This should be obvious, yet much of Israeli policy over recent decades has proceeded through its practical denial. A state founded to provide refuge for Jews has increasingly behaved as though territorial sovereignty also granted it authority over legitimate Jewishness. Citizenship, immigration, conversion, marriage and religious recognition have been assembled into a system in which state institutions and a privileged rabbinical apparatus determine who is Jewish enough, for which purpose and before which authority.

At that point, law no longer merely regulates civil status. It intervenes in the historical plurality of Jewish existence. A state may establish conditions of citizenship, residence and entry, but no such competence gives it the right to define the Jew for the Jewish world as a whole. Territorial sovereignty is not sovereignty over memory, genealogy, covenant, religious practice or communal belonging. The border of a state is not the border of Jewishness.

Israel did not create American Judaism, the Sephardic communities of France, the congregations of Britain, the Jewish institutions of Argentina or the forms of Jewish life developed in South Africa. It did not grant these communities their existence and cannot revoke it. They are not foreign offices of the Israeli state, and they do not require an Israeli certificate to be Jewish. Their rabbis, conversions, marriages, prayers and memories do not become less real because an Israeli authority........

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