Between Enlightenment and Obscurantism

The State of Israel could not have been founded without the legacy of the European Enlightenment. Its founding ideology, i.e., European-born Zionism, acquired its political and social savoir-faire through the pursuit of modernization. Catalysed by the rise of “scientific” anti-Semitism, a societal transformation was engendered oscillating between societal rejection (the reaction of ultra-Orthodoxy) and the desire for civil equality through assimilation. This changed the hitherto stratified “habitus” of European Jewry. The independence of the Jewish and democratic state in 1948 was the fruit of these contradictory processes. Nevertheless, the equilibrium between the two fundamental components of Israeli sovereignty is in constant conflict. The particularistic Jewish character conditions democratic universalism, while the state’s legal infrastructure struggles to find convergence and institutional balance. The essay explores the obscure aspects of the Israeli paradox and weighs them against Israel’s progressive autocratization and democratic regression.