and malleable while nevertheless orthodox in self-conception.
Because deep attachments to specific sites are a central feature of a settler identity, I map out their (paradoxical) character.8 Ideological settlement has become a way of lending a distinct order to the memory entailed in Jewish tradition, curtailing its dynamism, while narrowing possibilities for interpretation or revalorization. It shares features with Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire in the sense that it actually erases more variegated forms of local memory in favor of preserving narratives of a homogenized ethnonational past deemed suitable to this distinct form of Jewish observance (Nora 1989). In addition to erasing this type of variegated memory, ideological settlement reconstitutes the diasporic and transportable features of Jewish tradition replacing it with precise biblical sites. It does so in a way that is more literal and place-based than other known versions of Judaism, or labor Zionism (cf. Feige 2001).9 The literalism, then, of the religious settler project lies in the attempt to make places of habitation as sacred as the religious requirement of observing laws around marriage, diet, burial, and other commandments governing social life (mitsvot). In this manner, the legalistic aspect of Jewish tradition (halakha) becomes place dependent and enmeshed in actually inhabiting a material sacred geography (cf. Smith 1992).10
By focusing on place-based ties to religious sites and biblical regions (those that settlers refer to as “Judea” and “Samaria”), I distinguish resolute settler attachments from either the territoriality espoused by a sovereign Israeli state or theological concepts that view the Land of Israel as more of an aspirational terrain than a thing to be directly possessed. In short, resolute settler attachments remain small-scale and bounded, and though local loyalties and communities often coexist with those of a unified national culture (Appadurai 1996; Lomnitz 2001), these in particular cannot be encapsulated in a standard nationalist account. Settler investments in places like Hebron, in other words, continue to foreground the religious locale as the predominant basis for building the kinds of solidarities that often exclude even Zionist forms of belonging. They are shaped in relation to a tiered and asymmetrical social field within an occupied area and are therefore ultimately more focused on direct colonial or interpersonal relationships in self-enclosed and bounded insular worlds rather than on participating in a wider imagined (national) community.
Tradition and Change
This ethnographic emphasis on religious place and practice is an important way of considering changes to and distinct interpretations of Jewish tradition that are produced in relation to the many spatial practices that underwrite settling. It raises the question of how we can critically engage with these transformations and their implications for religious right social change. As a way of responding to this question, I draw on Talal Asad’s approaches to the social and power-laden dimensions of religion (based on his scholarship focusing on elements of Islam and Christianity), while at the same time resurrecting a number of critiques that are disallowed by them. That is, I aim to unpack some of the exploitative aspects of devout settler practices ushered in under the guise of Jewish authenticity while nevertheless recognizing the excesses of secular critiques, which tend to characterize religious orthodoxies as “irrational,” “backward,” and “threatening” by their very nature.
In order to explain my approach further, let me begin by mapping out key convergences and departures from those of Asad on religion. He understands religious traditions as a way of situating the self with respect to the past from the vantage of the present and contrasts this with secular modern tendencies to look primarily to the future as a form of identification and orientation (Asad 1993, 2003). Asad also reminds us that using the richness of tradition in this way is not the same as being backward. These insights are valuable because they show how uses of tradition entail change; traditions in his view are not “invented” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) but always transforming, since they must respond to contemporary challenges in the present, both internal and external, while trying to maintain a general coherence among key defining concepts (Asad 1993). Grappling with changing applications and understandings of a religious tradition for Asad also means rejecting scholars’ use of the category of “fundamentalism” (cf. Marty and Applebee 1991), which he sees as critical of piety more generally, based in part on the accusation of either politicizing or introducing false changes to religion. So Asad would reject the accusation that radical Islam is not true Islam or that settler Judaism is not true Judaism. Using the term “fundamentalism” as a way of characterizing these changes, he and others argue, misrepresents the changing nature of all religious traditions as well as their power dynamics and highlights the lack of reflexivity found in secularist critiques that project irrationality and violence onto religious views alone.
Moreover, Asad rightly points out that there is an important social dimension to religion that cannot be reduced to beliefs alone. He has incisively alerted us to the fact that power and hierarchy shape all religious communities. Asad (1993) also highlights the conditions under which religious “truths” are held to be valid, emphasizing the power dimensions of pedagogy, disciplining the body, and submission to religious authority. Yet in defending a place for religious perspectives and modes of resistance, Asad tends to underplay consolidations of power being ushered in under the sign of religion and the way religious authority can be impervious to critical engagements apart from those offered from within a religious community. Also, in terms of Asad’s explorations of power, he underplays the significance of space (emphasizing the body instead) as the primary medium through which religious subjectivities are shaped and relations of power expressed.11 The social hierarchy that is congealed in the spatial ordering of the built environment, for instance, significantly shapes the ethos of sacred sites and subjective attachments to it in a settler context. Neither involves submission or compliance alone, but they entail direct (and antagonistic) engagements with difference that require the submission of others.
This ethnography’s emphasis on spatial practice, then, builds on many of Asad’s critical insights but ultimately takes them in a different direction. First, it looks at the manner in which an entire spatial field gets entangled in settler forms of religious knowledge and discourse (cf. Stump 2008). Second, it focuses on a range of heterodox practices (e.g., property takeovers, parading, trespassing, harassment) that some might object to as not religious even though they are often enmeshed with an evolving ideological formation. Such practices are often religious in the sense of invoking concepts within a tradition, yet mainly colonial in their impacts, underwriting land expropriations by individual or settler groups who often operate under the auspices of the state. Finally, it embarks on a critical engagement with “orthodoxy.” I depart from Asad and others writing in this vein (Dalsheim 2011; Mahmood 2005; Brown 2013), then, by focusing on a range of exploitative practices, views, and sensibilities shielded by religion while nevertheless remaining sympathetic to attempts to decenter the primacy of secular rationality as normative.
Toward this critical engagement with settler orthodoxy, I take the spatial dimensions of religious practice to be a key domain of power. By examining the formation of an exclusive biblical geography on the ground and its pointed articulations with the state and its military, this ethnography attempts to offset the excesses of a (far-right) religious realm insulated from challenge by virtue of its material inscriptions and forms of naturalization. It also attempts to highlight the realm of less formally transmitted religious sensibilities in order to analyze how a range of settler devotees, including new converts and those not all that well versed in Jewish tradition, take part in claims to origins and place that evolve and change. Religious modes of (far-right) power that marginalize already precarious others, refuse dissent, and thrive on inequalities attempt to replace existing hierarchies with more authoritative forms of exploitation. Building on these concerns, this ethnography also evaluates the changes to Jewish tradition and practice introduced by settling—namely, the narrowing of an interpretive tradition and the colonial implications of a version of Judaism that serves to prolong a long-standing occupation.
Much of the scholarship on Jewish fundamentalism, in contrast, maps out the broad contours of change in a way that is mainly textual in its emphasis, exploring Judaism’s traditional messianic focus and its encounter with
