The Protestant’s warning to Israel
What Intra-Jewish Fragmentation Has in Common with the Wars That Nearly Destroyed Western Civilization — and the One Solution That Worked
Israel does not have a conflict between Judaism and the state. It has a conflict between competing Judaisms over which one the state will validate, fund, enforce, and embody.
The Haredi community is not fighting secular Israelis over whether Israel should be Jewish. It is fighting over whose Judaism defines what Jewish means. The Religious Zionist settler movement is not fighting the Supreme Court over whether the Land matters to the Jewish people. It is fighting over whether democratic law or divine command has higher standing when the two conflict. Secular Israeli Jews are not fighting to secularize their country. Many of them are fighting to preserve a vision of Jewish collective life — pluralist, democratic, continuous with the best of Jewish ethical tradition — that they believe the dominant coalition is dismantling.
These are not fights between Judaism and its enemies. They are fights within Judaism, among Jews, about what Judaism requires of a Jewish state. They are, in structure and in dynamic, almost exactly the fights that nearly destroyed European civilization between 1618 and 1648, and that the American founders studied with meticulous care before building the one institutional framework that has ever successfully managed them.
That framework was not built by people who wanted to drive religion out of public life. It was built by deeply religious people — Baptist ministers, Presbyterian elders, evangelical congregations — who had been persecuted by other Christians and who understood, from bitter institutional experience, that the most dangerous thing that can happen to authentic religious life is for the state to decide which version of it is correct.
Israel is about to learn this lesson. The only question is whether it learns it the way the Baptists did — through political organizing and constitutional architecture — or the way the Protestants of the Thirty Years’ War did, which is to say through catastrophe.
THE SAME DRIVES, A DIFFERENT LANGUAGE
In October 1517, Martin Luther posted his ninety-five theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg and inadvertently detonated a century of intra-Christian warfare. Luther was not trying to destroy the Church. He was trying to reform it from within, to correct what he saw as corruptions of authentic Christian teaching. He was, in his own understanding, defending true Christianity against a false version that had captured institutional authority.
Within a generation, there were dozens of Protestant communities, each claiming to represent authentic Christianity, each with different answers to the same questions: How should the community be governed? Who has the authority to interpret scripture? What does God require of political life? The institutional framework that had managed Christian religious conflict — the Catholic Church’s monopoly on legitimate spiritual authority — had been shattered. What replaced it was not pluralism. It was competition. Violent, existential, civilizationally costly competition over which community’s answer to those questions would hold state power.
The Thirty Years’ War — fought from 1618 to 1648 primarily among Christian communities disputing which confession would govern the German principalities — killed somewhere between a quarter and a third of the population of central Europe. It was not a war between Christianity and its enemies. It was a war among Christians who agreed on the centrality of their faith and disagreed, lethally, about which institutional expression of that faith deserved state authority.
Now read the State of Israel’s current political crisis through this lens.
Israeli Jewish society is not a monolith. It is a community fractured along lines that are as deep, as theologically charged, and as politically consequential as the rifts that split Protestant Christianity in the sixteenth century. The Haredi world, the Religious Zionist world, the traditional Mizrahi world, the secular Ashkenazi world, the liberal Jewish pluralist world — these are not merely political constituencies with different policy preferences. They are communities with incompatible accounts of what Judaism is, what it requires, and what a Jewish state should therefore look like.
The Haredi community understands Jewish authenticity as inseparable from Torah study, halakhic observance, and the authority of the great rabbinical decisors. Its relationship to Zionism has always been complicated — many of its founding streams were anti-Zionist on theological grounds, and its current accommodation with the Israeli state is structured around a transactional arrangement: state funding for yeshivot, exemption from military service, rabbinical jurisdiction over personal status law, in exchange for political support for whatever coalition will maintain those arrangements. The Haredi community does not claim that its vision of Judaism is one legitimate option among several. It claims that it is the only authentic version, and that its communal life must be protected from contamination by other visions.
The Religious Zionist settler community understands Jewish authenticity as inseparable from the Land — that the return to Eretz Yisrael is not merely a political project but a divinely commanded fulfillment of prophetic promise, that the settlement enterprise is a religious obligation, and that political arrangements — including democratic elections and Supreme Court decisions — that conflict with this theological conviction lack ultimate legitimacy. This community does not believe it is one political party among several. It believes it is acting on God’s instructions.
Secular Israeli Jews — themselves far from homogeneous — understand Jewish authenticity differently, but many of them understand it with equal depth of conviction. Many secular Israelis carry a Jewish identity that is national, cultural, ethical, and historically continuous with Jewish civilization without being observant in the Orthodox sense. Many of them understand themselves as heirs to a Jewish ethical tradition — justice, law, the dignity of the human person, the prophetic insistence that power must answer to moral principle — that the current political coalition, in their view, is betraying. They are not fighting to strip Judaism from the Israeli state. They are fighting for a version of Jewish identity they believe is as legitimate as the one the state is increasingly being organized to enforce.
These are identity fusion, authority hunger, and boundary maintenance — the same substrate drives that generated Europe’s intra-Protestant catastrophes — operating in Hebrew, in the Land of Israel, in the twenty-first century. The specific content is Jewish. The structural dynamic is identical. Multiple communities sharing a single, foundational identity whose content is contested to the point of mutual incomprehension, competing for the authority to define what that identity requires of political life, without an institutional framework adequate to manage the competition.
WHAT THE PROTESTANTS DISCOVERED
The European religious wars did not end because one community convinced the others. They ended, eventually, through exhaustion and through a slow, painful institutional discovery: that the question of which community’s theology was correct could not be settled by force, and that the attempt to settle it by force was destroying the civilization all communities shared.
The institutional insight that emerged from this exhaustion — codified imperfectly in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and developed more fully over the following century — was not that religion didn’t matter. It was that the state was the wrong instrument for settling religious questions. Not because religion was unimportant. Because it was too important — too deeply held, too identity-constitutive, too resistant to the kind of resolution that political power can impose — to be entrusted to the coercive machinery of the state without catastrophic consequences for everyone.
The American founders translated this institutional insight into a constitutional framework with a precision that remains unmatched. And the most important thing to understand about that framework — the thing that is almost always misrepresented in Israeli conversations about “separation of religion and state” — is who built it and why.
The First Amendment’s Establishment Clause was not the project of atheists or deists trying to drain religion from public life. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison provided the intellectual architecture, but the political force that made the clause possible was evangelical Protestant — Baptist and Presbyterian communities whose organizing, petitioning, and political pressure was the primary engine of the Virginia disestablishment campaign and the congressional lobbying that produced the First Amendment.
John Leland was a Baptist minister in Virginia who organized the Baptist communities that made Virginia’s ratification of the Constitution possible. He extracted from Madison a personal commitment to a bill of rights as the price of Baptist political support. He was not a secularist. He was an evangelical Christian of intense conviction who had watched Anglican Virginia tax Baptist congregations to fund Anglican clergy, imprison Baptist ministers for preaching without licenses, and use the machinery of state authority to enforce one Protestant community’s interpretation of Christianity against another’s. He wanted the state out of religion not because religion didn’t matter but because it mattered so much that state interference in it — on behalf of the wrong community — was an intolerable violation of authentic faith.
Roger Williams, the Baptist founder of Rhode Island who articulated the theological argument for “soul liberty” a century before the First Amendment, put it with theological precision: a faith imposed by civil authority is not faith. It is performance. The state has no jurisdiction over the conscience because the conscience is where the encounter with the divine occurs, and coercive political authority is incapable of producing genuine faith — it can only produce the appearance of compliance. Separating religious questions from state authority was, in Williams’s formulation, a protection of authentic religion, not an attack on it.
This is the lesson the founders extracted from the Protestant catastrophe. The state cannot tell you which version of your faith is correct. Not because your faith doesn’t matter. Because it matters more than the state can handle.
THE LESSON TRANSLATED INTO HEBREW
The Haredi community in Israel today occupies the structural position of the Anglican establishment in colonial Virginia. It is not making this comparison as a criticism of Haredi Judaism. It is a structural observation about what happens when any religious community uses state authority to enforce its interpretation of shared tradition on other communities that share that tradition but interpret it differently.
When the Orthodox rabbinate refuses to recognize Conservative and Reform conversions, it is using state authority — the state’s monopoly on legal definition of Jewishness for purposes of the Law of Return, citizenship, marriage, and burial — to adjudicate a genuinely contested theological question. Which community’s interpretation of halakha is authoritative? The rabbinate says its own. But Conservative and Reform communities have their own rabbinic decisors, their own scholarly traditions, their own claim to standing within the broad sweep of Jewish legal and ethical history. The state is not neutral on this question. The state has chosen sides.
When Haredi political parties block legislation that would create civil marriage, they are using state authority to enforce a specifically Orthodox halakhic position on Israelis — including secular Israelis, Masorti Jews, Reform Jews, and the growing community of Israeli citizens who are Jewish under the Law of Return but not halakhically Jewish according to the rabbinate’s standards — who do not share that position. This is not the Jewish state protecting Judaism. This is one Jewish community using the Jewish state to subordinate other Jewish communities.
The Baptist ministers of colonial Virginia would have recognized this immediately. The Anglican establishment was not fighting the Baptists because Baptists weren’t Christian. They were fighting them because they were the wrong kind of Christian — the wrong denomination, the wrong liturgical practice, the wrong institutional authority — and the established church used state power to make that difference costly.
The genius of the First Amendment — the specifically Baptist and Presbyterian genius — was to recognize that this dynamic destroys not just the persecuted community but ultimately the established one as well. When the state validates and funds one religious community’s interpretation of a shared tradition, it does not strengthen authentic faith. It corrupts it. It creates incentives for political performance of religious identity rather than genuine religious commitment. It entangles the community’s spiritual authority with the grubby machinery of coalition politics. It makes the community’s survival dependent on political arrangements that can change, rather than on the living faith of its members. The Haredi community’s dependence on state funding for its yeshivot and its exemption from military service is not a sign of Judaism’s strength in the Israeli state. It is a sign of a community that has traded spiritual authenticity for political arrangement — and that has made itself vulnerable to exactly the kind of political reversal that now threatens it.
SEPARATION AS PROTECTION, NOT ELIMINATION
Here is what the reframing requires, and what makes it genuinely difficult for everyone in this conversation.
The argument for separating state authority from religious adjudication in Israel is not the argument that Judaism should be private, or that the Jewish character of the Israeli state should be erased, or that halakha has no relevance to Israeli public life. It is the opposite argument.
Judaism — its ethical framework, its insistence on the dignity of every human person created in the image of God, its centuries of legal reasoning about justice and responsibility, its prophetic tradition of holding power accountable to moral principle — is the civilizational substrate of the Israeli state. It does not need to be encoded in state coercion to be real. It does not need the rabbinate’s monopoly on marriage law to be authoritative. It does not need Haredi exemptions from military service to be honored. It is real, it is authoritative, it is honored, because it is what the Jewish people carry in their bones and their books and their tradition — and it has survived two thousand years of exile, persecution, and dispersal without a state to enforce it.
The founders of American constitutionalism understood something analogous about Protestant Christianity. The moral and ethical framework of Protestant Christianity — its insistence on the individual conscience, its resistance to tyranny, its concept of covenant between a people and their God — was the civilizational substrate of the American republic. It did not need to be encoded in an established church to be operative. It was operative in the culture, the families, the communities, the habits of mind and civic life that Protestant Christianity had produced over two centuries of colonial experience. The founders could afford to prohibit the establishment of religion precisely because the tradition that the prohibition was designed to protect was so deeply embedded in the culture that it didn’t need the state’s endorsement to survive.
Israel’s Jewish tradition is at least as deeply embedded. Probably more so — two thousand years of concentrated transmission through the most remarkable pedagogical and communal apparatus in human history has produced a Jewish civilization whose content does not depend on the Israeli state to remain vital. The question of which form that vitality takes in any individual or community is precisely the question the state should not be answering.
What Israel needs is not secularism. It is something more specific and more historically precise: the institutional recognition that the state is the wrong instrument for settling the question of which community’s Judaism is authentic, because the attempt to settle that question through state authority will produce the same dynamic that the intra-Protestant conflict produced — communities hardened against each other, faith reduced to political performance, the shared civilization weakened by the competition of its parts for control of its institutions.
The separation Israel needs is not between Judaism and the state. It is between state authority and religious adjudication — between the legitimate functions of a democratic government and the illegitimate function of deciding, on behalf of the Jewish people, which interpretation of their tradition is correct.
WHAT MADISON WOULD SAY
James Madison’s central insight in Federalist No. 10 was that a diverse society whose communities hold incompatible visions of a shared identity needs an institutional framework that takes the adjudication of that identity off the political agenda. The solution to the problem of faction — including religious faction — was not to resolve the theological questions that generated the faction, but to build structures that made it impossible for any single faction to capture state authority and use it against all the others.
Madison understood, from direct political experience with the Virginia religious wars, that this insight applied most urgently to intra-religious conflict — to the case where the competing communities shared a foundational identity and disagreed about its authoritative interpretation. The Baptists and the Anglicans were both Protestant Christians. The Presbyterians and the Congregationalists were both Calvinist Protestants. Their conflicts were, precisely because they were conflicts within a shared tradition, more bitter and more irresolvable by ordinary political means than conflicts between entirely different traditions would have been. The closer communities are to each other in their foundational commitments, the more dangerous their political competition tends to be.
Apply this to Israel and the conclusion is sharp. The conflict between Haredi Judaism and Religious Zionist Judaism and traditional Mizrahi Judaism and secular Israeli Jewish identity and liberal Jewish pluralism is not a conflict between Judaism and its enemies. It is a conflict within Judaism, among communities whose proximity to each other and whose shared claim on the same foundational tradition makes their political competition precisely as dangerous as the intra-Protestant conflicts Madison had studied.
The solution Madison proposed was not to tell these communities which of them was theologically correct. It was to tell them that the state would not be the instrument for settling the question. Every community would retain full freedom to practice, teach, advocate for, and transmit its interpretation of the shared tradition. No community would be permitted to use state authority to impose its interpretation on the others. The state’s role was to hold the ring — to provide the institutional framework within which all communities could compete and coexist — not to serve as the theological arbiter.
For Israel, the specific institutional implications are both clear and politically agonizing. Civil marriage, so that the state is not in the business of deciding whose Jewishness counts for purposes of legally recognized partnership. Recognition of all Jewish denominations’ conversions for purposes of the Law of Return and civic identity. Separation of state funding from denominational religious instruction, so that Haredi yeshivot and Reform congregations and Masorti communities receive no more and no less state support than secular cultural institutions. Universal military service — or universal national service — so that the state’s most basic demand on its citizens reflects the shared civic identity rather than the arrangements of one community’s political leverage. An independent judiciary whose authority to protect constitutional rights does not depend on the current parliamentary majority’s tolerance.
None of these is the elimination of Judaism from Israeli public life. All of them are the removal of state authority from the business of deciding which Judaism wins.
THE SUBSTRATE REMAINS
The drives that generated the intra-Protestant catastrophes did not disappear when the First Amendment was ratified. They went underground in the constitutional design and have resurfaced in every generation of American history. The substrate problem — the human need for a political order that feels cosmically grounded, the hunger for an authority that is more than merely contractual, the impulse to fuse religious and national identity into a single total loyalty — is not solved by institutional design. It is managed by it.
Israel’s substrate is deeper than America’s was. The Jewish claim on the Land, the Jewish relationship to the tradition, the Jewish memory of persecution and survival and return — these are not political positions. They are identity-constitutive realities that run through every one of the competing communities, expressing themselves differently but drawing on the same irreducible source. No constitutional framework will dissolve them. No institutional design will make them disappear.
What a constitutional framework would do — what the specifically Baptist and Presbyterian genius of the First Amendment did for American Protestant pluralism — is change the channel through which the substrate drives flow. It would prevent any single community’s expression of those drives from capturing state authority. It would protect each community from the others, and each community from the state, while leaving the living tradition — in all its contentious, argumentative, millennially productive plurality — free to be what it has always been: a conversation that cannot be closed because the questions it addresses cannot be finally answered.
Judaism survived two thousand years without a state to enforce it. It survived not because it was monolithic but because it was argumentative — because the tradition of dispute, of multiple legitimate opinions, of the minority position preserved alongside the majority decision for future consideration, was built into its pedagogical and legal structures at the deepest level. The Talmud does not erase the losing argument. It records it, attributes it, and leaves it available for the generation that will understand it better.
That tradition — the tradition of Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel arguing across the centuries, both preserved, both honored, neither having the authority to eliminate the other — is exactly what an Israeli constitutional framework for managing intra-Jewish pluralism would look like in institutional form. Not the victory of one community’s Judaism over the others. The preservation of all of them, in their irresolvable disagreement, within a political structure that gives none of them the state’s coercive authority to settle what cannot and should not be settled.
The Baptist ministers of colonial Virginia understood this, because they had experienced what it cost when the state chose sides. The Haredi leadership of Israel’s 2024 coalition has not understood it yet — because they currently hold the leverage and have not yet fully paid the price that comes with using it as they are using it.
They will pay it. Every community that has used state authority to enforce its interpretation of a shared religious tradition against other communities within that tradition has eventually paid it — in the backlash, in the delegitimization, in the spiritual corruption that comes from confusing political power with divine mandate.
The founders built the instrument to prevent that cost from being borne. They called it a constitution. Israel, at this moment in its history, needs to build one — not to weaken Judaism in the Jewish state, but to protect it from what Jews do to each other when the state becomes the prize in a theological competition none of them can win and all of them are losing.
