Page 103 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

mainstream secular system, a “national religious” system, both directly funded
and operated by the state, and an ultra-Orthodox system, as well as a separate
state-run system for the Arab population. The ultra-Orthodox educational sys-
tem is in turn divided into two separate systems, one controlled by the Ash-
kenazi authorities of the Eastern European tradition and the other, recently cre-
ated and predominantly Sephardi, controlled by the leadership of Shas, the
party of religious renewal and Sephardi identity, founded in 1982.
The discourse and actions of the Shas leadership and the most active follow-
ers have tended toward the superimposition of disagreement and con®ict across
several different fault-lines at once: the secular-religious con®ict, the ethnic di-
visions between Ashkenazim—people of European descent—and Sephardim—
migrants from North Africa and the Middle East and their descendants—and
the division between elite and popular culture. Shas is different from the Ash-
kenazi ultra-Orthodox parties because of its emphasis on t’shuva—the process
whereby large numbers of people are brought “back” to religious observance. 4
Shas attracts people who are either “traditional” (masorati), in that they pre-
serve some customs but are not punctiliously observant, or who are from a
highly secularized lifestyle. Shas is also recognized as the party of the Sephar-
dim. The word Sephardi refers, strictly speaking, to the Judeo-Spanish (or Ladino)–
speaking people of the northern Mediterranean and northern Morocco, but in
recent decades it has come to refer to all Jews of North African, Middle Eastern,
and Persian descent, most of whom are by now second and third generation
immigrants, and many of whom are married to non-Sephardim. Taking into
account the resulting impossibility of giving precise numbers, it is generally ac-
cepted that they constitute slightly less than half of Israel’s Jewish population.
In political campaigns the party capitalizes deftly on the symbols and accoutre-
ments of Sephardi identity—accent, popular language and culture, Oriental mu-
sic, popular religion such as healing and the veneration of saints—but, in more
formal statements of policy, the leadership emphasizes t’shuva above everything
else. That different authors emphasize in different ways the ethnic and religious
elements in Shas’s appeal demonstrates the impossibility of separating the two
(Herzog 1995; Willis 1995; and Sha¤r and Peled 2002). In the long run, as some
have also said (Zohar 2001), Shas is transcending these alternatives and forging
an Orthodox Israeli Judaism which, if its in®uence continues to grow, will be-
come the dominant form, replacing the Ashkenazi-Sephardi divide inherited
from Jewish history and deepening the divide between Israeli religious culture
and the diaspora. Like the Pentecostals in Latin America, Shas and the t’shuva
movement in which it is the leading force can be understood as a revolt against
the hegemony of a cultural elite, and also as a project of reshaping the religious
sphere (Lehmann 1996; Lehmann 1998; Birman and Lehmann 1999).

What Kind of Social Movement?

The genius or good fortune of the founders of Shah was to link eth-
nic and religious renewal so that now it is hard to choose between a descrip-

92 David Lehmann and Batia Siebzehner