Settling Hebron. Tamara Neuman
tradition through the lens of settling and endowing it with a sense of religious obligation.
This chapter explores the key dimensions of change in Jewish thought and practice that have provided religious rationales for settling in Palestinian areas. It focuses on three concurrent kinds of change, making the case that these are in fact the most significant for understanding an authoritative ideological formation in the making. These dimensions include the ethical realm of moral behavior in Judaism, its relation to place-based forms of residence, and the treatment of other non-Jewish residents that follow from this spatial (and territorial) turn (cf. Fonrobert 2009). Jewish settlers, then, are not simply messianic believers, shaped by a pragmatic orientation toward the coming of the messianic era as many allege (Aran 1991; Ravitzky 1996; Inbari 2009; Taub 2011); rather, as believers, they are engaged in far more extensive and complicated forms of remaking. This deeper reworking of Judaism and the social life that follows from it entails the wholesale reorientation of its primary texts, ethical obligations, and rabbinic interpretations, in effect narrowing and particularizing the tradition’s interpretive possibilities. Biblical places, boundaries, and ownership of land are some of the obvious emphases that settlers bring to Jewish observance, and these take on a value that overrides concerns with peoplehood and future-oriented messianic longing. Moreover, ideological settlers have added to their place-based emphasis a concern with seeking out and finding hidden or erased origins. Origins as much as observing religious obligations and laws come to define and orient the “authentic” Jewish community. In practice, then, devout settlers have emphasized the significance of a growing number of sites of origin, as well as the routes to them, in order to expand into key Palestinian areas.
As a way of introducing some of the critical themes of the book and focusing on the ways Jewish tradition is being reworked, I begin by reconstructing a tour of Hebron led by a Jewish settler, showing the way it invokes and applies elements of Judaism to claim Palestinian land. These settler claims are then juxtaposed with the perspectives of a dissident Israeli soldier who served in Hebron and those of a Palestinian villager whose farmland lies near Kiryat Arba. While the three tours through the Hebron area actually took different routes and occurred at different times, I discuss them together in order to highlight the ways a settler’s religious claims are often reinforced by the dynamics of the military occupation. As parts of a composite whole, these different tours and perspectives are intended to both examine and disrupt features of an ideological religious vision that is becoming increasingly hegemonic.
Reframing Scripture
To provide a better sense of what settling religiously entails, I begin by turning to a reading of the Bible (Torah) that Hebron settlers typically champion as authoritative. Again, I am interested in the way the Bible’s diasporic elements are routinely read out or reframed, and I consider it important to ask: What features of the text are being emphasized so that settling Palestinian Hebron appears to be biblically mandated in the contemporary moment? While Hebron has long been considered sacred to Jews and while there is ample documentation that an Arab-speaking Jewish minority lived in the city during the Ottoman period, Jewish settler activists radically transformed land adjacent to and directly within the Palestinian city after their arrival in 1968. If Judaism is actually a multivalent and multilayered form of observance, requiring a variety of texts to be read in relation to one another in order to draw out its key values through comparison and contrast (Fishbane 1998, 2012), how have settlers made it more singular and used the Bible as a charter for their practices of expansion? How has Judaism’s legalistic emphasis on “doing” been reoriented to enable land takeovers? Moreover, how have interpretive debates that have taken place among rabbis or sages from the Middle Ages to the present been transformed by settler applications of these in order to erase the presence of Palestinians?
Let us begin with the particular reading of a biblical story often cited by militant settlers as a justification for settling Hebron. The passage appears in Genesis 23 as the “Life of Sarah,” a prototypical story of Sarah’s death and Abraham’s purchase of a burial site for her. Abraham, a stranger (ger vetoshav; lit., “a resident alien”) in Canaan, approaches Ephron, a prominent Hittite and landowner, in order to negotiate the purchase of a field containing a cave, the Cave of Makhpelah, so that he can bury his wife. Abraham says, “I am a resident alien among you; sell me a burial site, that I may remove my dead for burial.” In the passage, Ephron the Hittite responds that he may take it without paying, but Abraham nevertheless insists on purchasing it. The transaction between them is conducted within the hearing distance of the entire Hittite community and gets cemented by their respective social obligations to it as well as to one another. Their verbal agreement, then, has a public dimension and this helps make the land deal between individuals of two different peoples binding: Ephron says to Abraham, “A piece of land worth four hundred shekels of silver—what is that between you and me [beni u-venkha mah-hi]? Go and bury your dead [ve-et metkha ḳavur].” Hebron’s contemporary Jewish settlers allege that the burial cave purchased by Abraham for the full amount is evidence that the contemporary place, where the Ibrahimi Mosque (al-Ḥaram al-Ibrahimi) now exists, is their exclusive property to this day. They claim to be the original owners and that the Jewish burial caves lie far beneath the Muslim cenotaphs above ground. For religious settlers, the presence of the mosque does not point to a convergence of Judaism and Islam but rather the usurpation of their original sacred Jewish site. They claim a right to worship directly within the space of the Ibrahimi Mosque because they claim it is built over bequeathed Jewish property. By extension, they also claim a right to expand into other Palestinian areas of Hebron because of the historical Jewish community that was massacred in the 1929 riots and forced to leave. What is clearly absent in their project of “renewal” is not only a sense of the interrelatedness of three traditions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—but the often syncretic ways Judaism has been lived in relation to these other traditions in history.
Casting aside the issue of being able to precisely map the topography of the Bible onto the contemporary Palestinian landscape or whether Abraham is a historical figure (biblical 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