The Diaspora Is Not a Branch of Israel
The Diaspora is not a branch of Israel. Israel is one historical configuration of Jewish endurance: powerful, consequential and tragic, but neither prior to Jewish existence as a whole nor entitled to administer its boundaries. American, French, British, Argentine and South African Judaism do not receive their Jewishness from Jerusalem. They are not provincial variations of a central Israeli norm. They possess their own institutions, memories, languages, religious rhythms, internal disputes and ways of transmitting Jewish life across generations.
This should be obvious, yet much of Israeli policy over recent decades has proceeded through its practical denial. A state founded to provide refuge for Jews has increasingly behaved as though territorial sovereignty also granted it authority over legitimate Jewishness. Citizenship, immigration, conversion, marriage and religious recognition have been assembled into a system in which state institutions and a privileged rabbinical apparatus determine who is Jewish enough, for which purpose and before which authority.
At that point, law no longer merely regulates civil status. It intervenes in the historical plurality of Jewish existence. A state may establish conditions of citizenship, residence and entry, but no such competence gives it the right to define the Jew for the Jewish world as a whole. Territorial sovereignty is not sovereignty over memory, genealogy, covenant, religious practice or communal belonging. The border of a state is not the border of Jewishness.
Israel did not create American Judaism, the Sephardic communities of France, the congregations of Britain, the Jewish institutions of Argentina or the forms of Jewish life developed in South Africa. It did not grant these communities their existence and cannot revoke it. They are not foreign offices of the Israeli state, and they do not require an Israeli certificate to be Jewish. Their rabbis, conversions, marriages, prayers and memories do not become less real because an Israeli authority refuses to recognize them under its administrative standard.
The most dangerous shift occurs when representation is confused with jurisdiction. Israel’s claim to speak on behalf of the Jewish people has gradually been accompanied by a claim to classify its members: to determine which forms of Jewish life are complete, doubtful, conditional or insufficient. Representation then becomes a power of selection, and the state that claims to embody Jewish plurality begins to establish a hierarchy within it.
This is not merely a dispute between Orthodoxy and Reform Judaism, nor a technical controversy over conversion. The more fundamental question is who possesses the authority to define Jewish reality. Israeli governments increasingly behave as though that authority belongs to institutions controlled by the state or granted a state-protected monopoly. Yet Judaism has never existed as a uniform substance governed by a single center. It endured precisely because no sovereign institution succeeded in enclosing its plurality within one administrative norm.
Jerusalem remains an axis of memory, prayer and longing. It does not follow that a modern state whose capital is located there inherits authority over every form of Jewish life. The sanctity of a place does not pass automatically into the hands of a bureaucracy. A government office does not become the Sanhedrin because it operates in Jerusalem, and a parliamentary coalition does not acquire the right to determine the boundaries of the Jewish people merely because it calls itself Jewish.
Recent statements by politicians such as Itamar Ben-Gvir matter not because they introduce an entirely new doctrine, but because they expose without euphemism a logic already embedded in the system. When a politician suggests who is a real Jew and who merely carries the name, he is not offering an innocent religious distinction. He is converting Jewishness into a political instrument of inclusion, exclusion and discipline.
Ben-Gvir is therefore not only an extremist exception. He is a moment of institutional candor. He reveals how a definition of the Jew can be used to rank citizens, delegitimize opponents, discipline the Diaspora and narrow the community to those compatible with the current religious and political arrangement. Once such criteria enter the language of the state, no Jewish community can be certain that its recognition will not eventually depend on political loyalty, denominational conformity, genealogy or usefulness.
The issue is not simply religious law. It concerns the attempted ownership of a concept. Whoever claims the authority to define the Jew also claims power over who may belong, inherit, marry, migrate, speak and be recognized as part of a common history. Definitions of this kind do not neutrally describe an existing reality. They distribute rights, legitimacy and visibility.
For decades, Israel has expected the Diaspora to provide money, political advocacy, institutional protection and public identification with Israeli security. At the same time, it has tolerated and often strengthened institutions that question the legitimacy of the forms of Judaism through which much of that Diaspora actually lives. Israel wanted the Diaspora as political infrastructure, a financial resource and a reserve of legitimacy, but not as an equal author of Jewish existence.
That is not mutual recognition. It is an extractive relationship. The Diaspora is expected to provide loyalty and protection while Israel reserves the power to decide whether its Jewishness is sufficiently authentic. No such arrangement can remain stable indefinitely, because no community will defend without limit a state that treats its own form of existence as religiously secondary or administratively suspect.
The loss of the Diaspora does not begin when young Jews cease defending every decision of an Israeli government. It begins when the state ceases to recognize them as full participants in Jewish life. Criticism of Israel is not necessarily the original cause of estrangement; it is often its consequence. People withdraw from an institution that demands identification while withholding equal recognition.
This is also the dark reverse of “Israel First.” A politics that places the state before its citizens will eventually place the state before the Jewish people as well. Once Israel becomes the measure of Jewish legitimacy, Jews are no longer asked whether the state serves Jewish life; they are judged according to whether their Jewish life serves the state.
The Diaspora is not a branch of Israel. It does not exist at Israel’s periphery, awaiting confirmation from a political center. Israel is one branch within a long, dispersed and irreducibly plural history of Jewish endurance. Its establishment transformed Jewish history, but it did not absorb that history, replace it or acquire ownership over it.
Israel is not the proprietor of Jewishness. It is not its central registry and not the sole legitimate form of Jewish historical existence. It is one Jewish configuration among others, created under particular historical conditions and subject to judgment like every other human institution. Its political strength does not make its definitions more truthful, and its importance does not grant it the authority to invalidate Jewish lives developed beyond its jurisdiction.
A state may define its citizens, but it cannot define the Jew for all Jews. It may regulate its borders, but it cannot identify those borders with the limits of Judaism. It may speak for its own citizens, but when it claims to speak for the entire Jewish people while questioning the Jewishness of those outside its political and religious norm, it ceases to represent Jewish plurality and begins to compete with it.
The Diaspora is not a branch of Israel. Israel is one branch within the long, dispersed and uncontained endurance of the Jewish people. No election, coalition, rabbinical monopoly or slogan of “Israel First” can reverse that historical order.
Yochanan Schimmelpfennig
