As If It Was Ours All Along: Precarious Belonging, Jewish Habitus and the Materialisation of Conversion in Israel

Most scholarship on Jewish conversion in Israel emphasises the precarious entanglement between the process and the politics of the Jewish State. This article, instead, unpacks the uncertain modes of converts’ belonging from an unexplored yet central angle–that of a Jewish habitus. I trace the challenging apprenticeship that aspiring converts undertake in developing a Jewish habitus, and the deeply ambiguous modes of belonging that such an apprenticeship shapes. By evaluating ethnographically the discourses and practices that aspiring converts are introduced to, this article detects how attempts to help them adopt the Jewish insiders’ embodied dispositions and materially embedded engagements simultaneously, albeit inadvertently, mark them as profoundly outsiders. The case study of Jewish conversion in Israel offers a compelling example with which to consider the conceptual links between belonging, habitus and conversion.