No One Expects the Israeli Inquisition

Abstract: Today, in Israel, state actors glean information on Israeli Jewish citizens and centralize that information in a computerized database; they cross-examine citizens about their beliefs, religious habits and sexual activity; they target new immigrants, requiring them to prove that they are Jewish; and they blacklist persons as ineligible to marry, including children whom they suspect were born of kinship relations deemed illicit according to biblical law (henceforth: mamzer , pl. mamzerim ). All this un-civil activity operates under the aegis of the state's rabbinical courts and Chief Rabbinate and functions way beyond the boundaries of a courtroom, forming a complex extrajudicial, semi-prosecutorial state apparatus that violates principles of equality, solidarity, liberty and fairness—harming women in particular and Israeli society in general. Because of the size and bureaucratic nature of this apparatus and how it makes use of state power to dominate, invade and sometimes even destroy the private lives of individuals, I refer to it as the "Israeli Inquisition," a word I use purposefully in order to "scandalize" it and underscore the need for tikkun olam , civil repair, as I will discuss in the Conclusion. And while complications from the entanglement of state and religion in Israel certainly were predictable from the outset, I posit, with a tongue-in-cheek nod to Monty Python, that this inquisition was not anticipated. No one expected it. The thinkers and politicians who legitimated and institutionalized the Chief Rabbinate and its courts at the beginning of the state did not and could not have foreseen the girth and breadth of the mechanisms that have flourished since the year 2000. This paper is about the growing power of Israel's Chief Rabbinate and rabbinical courts, and how the state's secular Supreme Court has been complicit in this phenomenon. It is about a grave episode wherein Israel society has not been able to sustain moral outrage, and wherein its regulatory institutions have not only failed to act and to execute badly needed civil repairs, but have sadly exacerbated egregious, un-civil practices.