Democracy and judaism

This chapter shows that Conflict Thesis (CT), understood as a thesis about the relation between religion and democracy, is unpersuasive. It aims to explore the concerns that really lie behind CT, concerns about the idea of Israel as a nation-state for all the Jewish people. The chapter suggests that in many cases what really fuels CT is not a concern about a tension between Judaism-conceived-as-halakha and democracy, but a tension between Judaism-conceived-as-nationalism and democracy. Supporters of CT tend to give the impression that the terms ‘democracy’ and ‘Judaism’ are clearly defined, in a way that makes it possible to speak about a conflict between them. In the early 1990s, a stormy debate on the relation between democracy and Judaism erupted on the Israeli scene. The debate about the moral status of Zionism is thus central in understanding the debate about Judaism and democracy.