A Home for All Jews

Citizenship, Rights, and National Identity in the New Israeli State

Orit Rozin

• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781611689518
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Orit Rozin's inspired scholarship focuses on the construction and negotiation of citizenship in Israel during the state's first decade. Positioning itself both within and against much of the critical sociological literature on the period, this work reveals the dire historical circumstances, the ideological and bureaucratic pressures, that limited the freedoms of Israeli citizens. At the same time it shows the capacity of the bureaucracy for flexibility and of the populace for protest against measures it found unjust and humiliating. Rozin sets her work within a solid analytical framework, drawing on a variety of historical sources portraying the voices, thoughts, and feelings of Israelis, as well as theoretical literature on the nature of modern citizenship and the relation between citizenship and nationality. She takes on both negative and positive freedoms (freedom from and freedom to) in her analysis of three discrete yet overlapping issues: the right to childhood (and freedom from coerced marriage at a tender age); the right to travel abroad (freedom of movement being a pillar of a liberal society); and the right to speak out—not only to protest without fear of reprisal, but to speak in the expectation of being heeded and recognized. This book will appeal to scholars and students of Israeli history, law, politics, and culture, and to scholars of nation building more generally.

CHAPTER ONE

The Right to Childhood and the Age of Marriage Law

A few dark-skinned, dark-eyed little girls, new immigrants from Yemen, displayed astounding audacity and courage. Girls who were twelve years of age, ten, even eight, dared to wave their tiny fists against their husbands, firmly announcing that they refuse to be married women and that they fully intended to attend school. . . . Some of the “husbands” (there were cases in which fifty-year-old men had taken a ten-year-old girl for a wife) insisted that the young girls continue to live with them. “I love her,” said one of these gentlemen, “and she must be my wife. She is already ten years old, that’s old enough. I paid the bride price that was quoted, I am married legally according to Jewish law. Why should I let her go?”¹

IN NOVEMBER 1949, Ada Maimon, a member of the ruling party Mapai serving in the Knesset, raised the question of child marriage at a meeting of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee. She demanded that the Criminal Code Ordinance of 1936 be amended to raise the permitted marriage age. Maimon had previously headed the Council of Women Workers, Israel’s largest women’s organization, which had been established in 1921 as part of the Histadrut. In 1949 she also served as a member of the board of the Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO), a philanthropic group that represented middle-class women. In a letter she sent to Yosef Lamm, another of Mapai’s representatives on the committee, she rehearsed the long history of involvement in this issue by the Yishuv’s women’s organizations. Proposals to raise the marriage age, she noted, had been tabled from time to time in the National Council (the Yishuv’s representative body), and no significant action had been taken. Her demand (and a subsequent bill she submitted) that the issue be addressed was prompted by the arrival of a large wave of immigrants from Yemen that had begun a few months earlier.² “It is an urgent matter,” she wrote, “because in the Yemenite camps we now see mothers of the age of thirteen–fourteen with babies in their arms.”³

Maimon’s motion to raise the age of marriage to eighteen makes it clear that she viewed allowing children to become mothers as being in utter contradiction to the identity, values, culture, and morals of Israeli society in general and those of its women’s organizations in particular. She demanded that her bill be taken up quickly, so as to save as many girls as possible before they were married off.⁴

At the beginning of the wave of mass immigration that began when the Israeli state was founded, the newcomers came primarily from Europe. But in 1949 the balance changed. In that year, nearly half the immigrants came from the Islamic world, and they constituted the great majority of newcomers in the years that followed.⁵ While the immigrants included only a few tens of thousands of Yemenites, they attracted unprecedented public attention. From the perspective of old-time Israelis, in their short airplane trip from Yemen to Israel these immigrants seemed to have traversed centuries, coming from the Middle Ages straight into the modern age. On the one hand, they were held up in wonder as examples of authentic Jews unsullied by the ills of modern life, while on the other hand, they were mocked for their ostensibly primitive habits.⁶ Child marriages (those in which the bride was under the age of fifteen according to the British Mandate Criminal Code Ordinance 1936) were common among these newcomers, and there were also cases of marriage of prepubertal girls.⁷

The larger Jewish world had undergone changes in this regard, but not the Jews of Yemen. Beginning in the eighteenth century, Jewish women in Central Europe began to marry no earlier than their mid-twenties, and sometimes even later. In the nineteenth century, following the impact of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), the standard marriage age rose among Eastern European Jews as well. The Haskalah also had a major impact on other aspects of marriage. For example, the tradition of parents arranging matches for their children waned, and more Jews married for love. In 1902, only about a quarter of the Jewish women in czarist Russia married before the age of twenty.⁸ Because more and more girls were attending school in Jewish communities throughout the Middle East and North Africa, the age of women at marriage there also rose gradually, beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, although at a more moderate rate. These changes were most pronounced in the cities; in some rural communities girls continued to be married off at the age of twelve or thirteen. In Yemen, however, girls did not attend school and did not learn to read and write.⁹

The Age of Marriage Law in Current Scholarship

A number of scholars have written about the Age of Marriage Law. Shoham Melamed and Yehuda Shenhav claim that the law’s purpose was to restrict the fertility of the Mizrahi Jews, which the absorbing population viewed as a demographic threat. Following the lead of Jacqueline Portugese, who has claimed that the law’s purpose was to curtail Arab reproduction rates, they also argued that the law was enacted under the influence of neo-Malthusian fears that prevailed in the West after World War II. The law, they say, was part of a structured and deliberate government policy.¹⁰

Aharon Layish found that the sharia courts and Muslim population did not comply with the law and were able to evade it. Nevertheless, the marriage age among Muslims rose during the 1950s and 1960s. In Layish’s estimation, however, the law played only a secondary role in this change, and economic and cultural factors had far more influence.¹¹ Andrew Treitel, who has also examined the interplay of Israeli law with Muslim law and the Muslim religious courts, claims that it was Muslim pressure that led to an amendment to the law in 1960 that granted judges discretion in awarding marriage permits to underage minors.¹²

Melamed and Shenhav’s studies contradict Layish’s and Treitel’s. If the growing size of the Arab (and the Mizrahi) population was perceived as a menace, the state would certainly have enforced the law, and Israeli legislators would not have revised it in 1960 to make underage marriages easier.

The following discussion covering the campaign to amend the criminal code to include a minimum marriage age during the 1920s and 1930s will disprove the claim made by Melamed and Shenhav that the effort to raise the marriage age was inspired by postwar trends. Their second claim, that the law was one part of a comprehensive antinatalist government policy is also open to serious doubt given the contemporary campaign to enlarge Israel’s Jewish population—including its Mizrahi population—at that time. In July 1949, the government voted to grant mothers of ten or more children a one-time payment of 100 Israeli lira. In September 1949, as a “first step in the government’s action to encourage the birthrate in the country,” birth prizes were awarded.¹³ That same year a Birth Fund in the Office of the Prime Minister provided financial aid to needy mothers to pay for housekeeping help and baby and maternal products.¹⁴ Most of the women who won the birth prize during the state’s early years were from the Mizrahi community. Prizes were also awarded to Arab women.¹⁵ In 1950, the year in which the Age of Marriage Law was debated, and in 1951 huge numbers of immigrants continued to arrive, including tens of thousands from the Islamic world.¹⁶ Furthermore, policymakers frequently gave voice to maternalist ideas, praising mothers as the producers of the nation’s children, and this outlook had practical consequences—for example, preventing women’s service in combat roles in the Israel Defense Forces.¹⁷ Along the same lines, a provision in the Social Security Law of 1953 mandated that the state pay for the costs of giving birth in a hospital. In addition, new mothers were also given a grant to use for the purchase of basic equipment for the baby. Given the dire living conditions of immigrants at the time, this money undoubtedly helped babies and mothers survive.¹⁸ This provision was motivated by decision makers’ alarm at the sharp rise in infant mortality among the immigrants, including among the Mizrahim.¹⁹ In 1959, the Social Security system began paying child allowances to families with four or more children.²⁰

Contrary to Melamed’s and Shenhav’s claims, the Age of Marriage Law was not even a government initiative. It is clear, however, that demographic anxiety was indeed part of the discourse surrounding the law. Moreover, Melamed has persuasively captured the ambiguity that was inherent in the absorption into Israel of the Jews of the Islamic world, who found themselves walking a narrow line between inclusion and exclusion.²¹

Laws are founded on broad and solid conceptual frameworks, as Shenhav, Melamed, and I all agree. We differ, however, in identifying the historical facts that enable the reconstruction of the actual ideational framework on which the Age of Marriage Law was based.

The Right to Childhood

Maimon’s bill to raise the age of marriage was a direct continuation of the modern Western society’s refashioning of the family. That project had its origin in the reform movement in the field of health (specifically related to sexuality), welfare, and education, as well as the movement to advance the status of children and women, which gained momentum at the beginning of the twentieth century.

In 1900 the Swedish feminist Ellen Key published The Century of the Child, laying out what was at the time an innovative theory of education.²² It was translated into English in 1909, as well as into eight other languages, and quickly became a bestseller. To a large extent, it served as a foundation for the ideas of the Progressive Era in the United States and highly influenced thinking about the status of children in other countries as well.²³ By the beginning of the twentieth century, child welfare projects included a large range of philanthropic programs and legislative initiatives. In the United States, children were viewed as the largest group requiring assistance and intervention. These broad and varied efforts to care for and assist children were not motivated solely by compassion. Children were seen as the key to social control. For future generations to possess the strength of mind, body, and character necessary to fulfill the responsibilities of democratic citizens, children needed to be protected. Children were the hope—or the threat—of the future.²⁴

The right to childhood was defined as a child’s right to life, education, happiness, and protection. Saving children and guaranteeing their right to childhood became both a moral and a national mission in the United States and other Western countries. But doing so required that the state insert itself into the life of the family.²⁵

The nature of the change in the status of children and childhood in the nineteenth century and especially in the early decades of the twentieth is explained most clearly in discussions of the economic value of children. The birth of a child in eighteenth-century rural America was welcomed as the arrival of a future laborer and as security for the parents later in life.²⁶ By the 1930s, lower-class children had joined their middle-class counterparts in a new nonproductive world of childhood, a world in which the sanctity and emotional value of a child made child labor taboo.²⁷ Children became economically worthless at the same time that they became emotionally priceless.²⁸

The revolution in the lives of children in the West was accomplished in part by women’s organizations that sought to improve and celebrate the lives of mothers. The members of these organizations were middle-class women who wanted to remake the status of women in the capitalist-industrial order without challenging the superior position of the father in the family. They viewed advances in women’s rights as inextricably bound up with the status of children, and they lauded women’s role as mothers.²⁹

Founded in the period from the 1870s to the 1930s, these organizations transferred the traditional housekeeping and child-care roles of women into the public and political sphere. In the organizations’ rhetoric, women were important to society because they were the primary caretakers of children and thus responsible for society’s future. Therefore, society had to do all it could to enable women to be better mothers. These women’s organizations were decisive shapers of Western welfare policy and legislation—in particular, of labor laws and legislation addressing the health of children and infants. Scholars have named this movement maternalism.³⁰

Yet at the same time, other women’s organizations waged a feminist struggle to gain full rights for women outside their role as mothers. The most prominent of their demands in the United States and Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century was the right to vote. The Yishuv was no exception: its women demanded the right to vote in elections to their society’s representative institutions and finally won the suffrage battle in 1926.³¹ In the Yishuv and Israel, bourgeois women’s organizations such as WIZO and the Union of Hebrew Women for Equal Rights, as well as the labor movement’s Council of Women Workers, combined maternal and feminist messages, in varying proportions.³² Since theirs was a society preoccupied with building a nation in the context of a national struggle for self-determination,³³ and because one of a mother’s duties was to instill her children with Zionist values,³⁴ their campaigns were highly maternalist and nationalist in tone. Yet this does not mean that they were entirely devoid of feminist sentiments.³⁵

The larger Western discourse influenced the Yishuv and Israel both because the campaigns in other countries served as models for reform, and because many local reformers came to the Yishuv and Israel from countries where issues pertaining to children’s and women’s rights were of central public concern.³⁶

Maimon’s bill grew out of a long effort during the Mandate period to enact legal limits on when young peop...