Towards an anthropology of doubt: the case of religious reproduction in Orthodox Judaism

As Israel’s Orthodox Jews struggle to live up to high-fertility norms rooted in religious and Zionist ideals, an obscured model of stratified critique has emerged. Based on an ethnography of Israel’s reproductive landscape, I found that critique of high fertility standards is based on particular social and cultural capital only available to the religious elite. While scholars of religious critique have demonstrated how religious elites act as actors and leaders of resistance, my findings illustrate an opposite pattern. Instead of disseminating this critique publicly, religious elites engage in private strategies of secrecy as well as creative performances of failure that enable these individuals to diverge from norms without publicly contesting them. Following Shellee Colen’s term “stratified reproduction” (Colen, 1995), I demonstrate how these strategies create hidden power relations by which some people are empowered to nurture and reproduce, while others are disempowered. Secrecy creates a distinction between different sub-groups of Orthodox communities, as it is specifically the newcomers, the Ba’aley Teshuva (regenerated Jews) that are currently carrying most of the fertility load. This phenomenon obliges us to rethink the ideological and harmonious picture of religious life by focusing on the struggles, failures, and power entailed in ‘everyday Judaism’. This vivid and complicated picture adds to the current anthropological debate on ‘everyday religion’ as well as offers a unique setting to explore how convictions gain and lose their force at particular moments in history.Hebrew University and Israeli Democracy Institut