scholars consider him to be mythical), the settler claim depends on the idea that Judaism has a more authentic right to the site than do other religious traditions that emerge later in relation to it. Theirs is not, in other words, a pluralistic stance that recognizes multiple truths or the veracity of other traditions that intersect and come together in the figure of Abraham. Rather, Jewish settlers take as a given the need to pry these convergences apart and order competing claims along a linear time line. Christianity and Islam are thought of as later and less authentic additions. Ideological settlers are therefore concerned with returning to and restoring a form of authenticity deemed lost—not just a settler preoccupation, to be sure, but one that has been applied to the specific cause of settling in complicated ways. They also believe that as a Jewish vanguard (to the exclusion of other versions of Jewish observance or other Jewish communities in Israel and beyond) they have a right to stand in as the direct “inheritors” of Hebron for all other Jews. In other words, settlers emphasize that this property has literally been passed down to them across the ages (they are its heirs as the reflexive Hebrew term for “inherit,” hitnaḥel, suggests) and that all Jews must eventually return to a place bequeathed to Abraham’s descendants. They therefore claim to hold onto and inhabit property in Hebron not only for Jews in Israel and the direct descendants of those who actually lost property in the 1929 riots but for those living abroad in the diaspora. And yet other potential readings of Abraham’s purchase highlight the settlers’ interpretive reorientation of the Bible and show how it has transformed Judaism’s values around property and relations with non-Jews.
Much of the scholarship on diaspora mentions burial as a common dilemma (Levy 2001; Levy and Weingrod 2004; Ho 2006). Individual members of a diaspora are inevitably forced to create geographic ties when burying their dead, giving rise to competing loyalties. In other words, burials spur attachments to a grave as a site of remembrance, and the grave competes with deterritorialized self-definitions that do not depend on any particular locale (Levy 2001; Gonen 2004). Where, in other words, is it fitting to bury a person who has lived out his or her life within a diasporic context (cf. Clifford 1994; Huyssen 2003)? Anywhere and nowhere are equally sound answers. One could readily read Abraham’s purchase of Sarah’s burial site as working through this dilemma; a resident alien among Hittites, his family lacks a self-evident burial site, and he therefore purchases a plot. Sarah’s death and burial creates an emotional link to a particular place, but it is an arbitrary one that stands in tension with other, de-territorialized forms of affiliation. While this tension is key to the biblical story, a settler stance attempts to create consistency and certainty in the face of the ambiguity it exposes. Any diasporic elements are made to disappear and then replaced by an emphasis on full ownership of this particular piece of property. Hebron and the edifice Meʿarat ha-Makhpelah are deemed significant by Jewish settlers because they are thought to mark the precise location of the graves of the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs.2
Contemporary property rights seem to be directly conferred by the Bible. Yet it is worth noting that many of the passage’s key elements regarding Abraham’s purchase are erased by this view. I have never heard any resident of Kiryat Arba or the remade Jewish Quarter in Hebron mention, for instance, that Abraham is a resident alien when he carries out the purchase, or that he buries his wife in a Hittite area, or that he bows low in deference to that people when purchasing the property, all features of the Bible that point toward a multilayered diasporic problematic.3 Abraham may own the property but his ownership is nonetheless underscored by his engagement with other (even pagan-worshipping) people and his outsider status in the area. The settler reading of this passage, in contrast, depends on an interpretative reframing that emphasizes his exclusive ownership and control, and this in turn is matched by prevailing social conditions outside the text that grant their particular readings an apparent plausibility. I am therefore interested in the ways that these ideological interpretations become authoritative and the ways secular Jews who support settlement defer to ideological settlers in the name of authenticity. In other words, what social conditions enable this particular application of Jewish tradition to appear both compelling and authentic to settlers and their supporters?
A Settler Tour
To consider the remaking of tradition in lived practice, I turn to the settler tours of Chaim Mageni, a founding resident of Kiryat Arba and guide who with a certain flair expressed key elements of this ideological settler sensibility.4 During his life, Mageni took hundreds of religious and settler-oriented Jewish tour groups directly into Palestinian neighborhoods throughout the West Bank and stood on location, recreating biblical events in order to bring the past, as he rendered it, to life. His tours consisted of stories, histories, archaeological evidence, hearsay, and hypothetical situations woven together to form a persuasive tale. Though disturbing in many respects, they illustrate how settler claims can seem persuasive for an audience disposed to believe them. To be convincing to the tourists in his charge, in other words, Mageni didn’t just quote a biblical passage, but rather, armed with the Bible, he actually sought to reframe his audience’s perceptions of an existing Palestinian reality. In short, Mageni’s authority as guide and as a devout Jew depended on the facility with which he could invoke and draw on a vast textual tradition that was equally grounded in colonial erasure. Given that most of Mageni’s tours took place in Palestinian towns, what sorts of claims seemed to forge attachments to place, shape community, and elicit devotion? These questions remain important because they point to an ideological formation incrementally taking shape in material form. Long before a Jewish settlement actually gets built, settler tours such as these and other practices that remake space lay the groundwork for a material inscription of the biblical past that provides an experience of devout “truth” in the present.
First, let me give a few biographical details about Mageni himself. He grew up in a working-class section of the Bronx and then became active in the Bnei Akiva movement, a religious-oriented Zionist youth movement in the United States that emphasized the importance of immigrating to Israel and working the land. He left the Bronx for Israel just after the 1967 war and studied in Yeshivat Merḳaz ha-Rav Kook, the premier national-religious school of higher education that historically has shaped the views of many leaders of the ideological settler movement. Shortly after he finished his education, Mageni was involved in establishing Gush Etzion, the first settlement to be built in the occupied territories south of Jerusalem in the Judean Hills (Mageni Family 2003). Gush Etzion was ideological in the sense that it did not have a direct security rationale attached to it. Rather, its significance was rooted in a national historical memory, reinstating a pre-state settlement that had been overtaken and whose residents were killed in an ambush during the 1948 war. The establishment of this settlement over the Green Line, shortly after the 1967 war and Israeli occupation of the West Bank, took place with the government’s blessing. Yet in order to carry it out, religious settlers first tapped into a wider nostalgia for the lost Jewish community that had once lived and died there. The subsequent founding of Kiryat Arba not long afterward employed a different ideological rationale because it was set up for explicitly religious reasons—Hebron was seen by most Israeli Jews as a significant site of origin. Like Gush Etzion, it also was important for the historical Jewish minority that had been massacred there during the 1929 riots that swept Palestine (cf. Mattar 1992:33–49; Cohen 2015). Settlers claimed to be returning to a point of biblical origin and, at the same time, to be renewing a more recent historical Jewish presence, reclaiming either the biblical or lost property of Jews without distinction since both were seen to form a continuous past.
Reconstructing the route of Mageni’s tour, I state in my fieldnotes that his bus traveled from Jerusalem through the Palestinian towns of Beit Jala, Bethlehem, Halhoul, and then directly to the city of Hebron. This took place during the early phases of the Oslo period before the Israeli army had actually redeployed from Palestinian city centers and before the Palestinian Authority had assumed control. My notes also document visible signs of the First Intifada, or uprising, in Palestinian areas, specifically garbage cans smoldering and burning tires strewn on the road. Overlooking these features, Mageni stood at the front of the bus with microphone in hand nearly choking on his words. “The road we are on, though paved with asphalt, is one of the oldest arteries known to mankind … it is the route that our father Abraham, the very first Jew,
