The status of religion in emergent political regimes: lessons from Turkey and Israel

Why do some newly formed regimes incorporate religion in various dimensions of public affairs, while others relegate religious actors and content to the private sphere? This article offers an explanatory model with four key components that together determine the status of religion in newborn political regimes: (1) the pervasiveness of religion in the old order; (2) the overlap among different ingredients of national‐identity; (3) the constraints of demographic realities; and (4) the period before and during the formation of the new regime as critical juncture. The model is applied and tested in the cases of Israel and Turkey, which in many respects represent opposite trends – accommodation and marginalization, respectively – that produced broad and long‐term consequences for their respective political regimes.     

A transnational millet in the Jewish state: A Judeo-Spanish diaspora between Israel and Turkey, 1948–1958

Between 1948 and 1956, 36,302 Jews migrated from Turkey to Israel, forming the largest Turkish diaspora hub at that time. Drawing on the nine newspapers published by Turkish Jews in Israel in their vernacular, Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), this article sheds light on the complex nature of the migrants' transnational affinity to the Turkish Republic and on how it coexisted with their Jewish nationalism. In addition to situating this development within the broader context of post-WWII Turkish transnationalism, we also delineate their unique historic status as ethnic Jewish communities or millet. Examining the post-Ottoman era, we show how they leveraged their political, commercial and leisure-related ties with Turkey—deemed more developed in those terms than Israel—to empower themselves as an ethnic community and to facilitate their integration into the Jewish state. In so doing, this study bridges some of the gaps in the analyses of Muslim and non-Muslim migrations, and it suggests that we rethink the languages used to explore Turkish transnationalism as well as its geographical borders and underlying characteristics.     

Organized waste disposal in the Pottery Neolithic: A bifacial workshop refuse pit at Ein Zippori,Israel

A unique Pottery Neolithic context corresponding to the Wadi Rabah culture was found at the multi-layered site of Ein Zippori, Israel. Given the significant amount of flakes, cortical flakes, thinning flakes, and bifacial tool rejects, it was classified as a refuse pit in which bifacial knapping waste from a nearby workshop was disposed. In this paper we present the assemblage of Locus 8071, focusing on the by-products of bifacial tool manufacture and maintenance as well as bifacial tool rejects. We reconstruct the bifacial knapping and maintenance procedures and suggest that Locus 8071 was a disposal area for by-products from a knapping workshop of bifacial tools—an aspect of spatial organization related to possible specialized lithic production at Ein Zippori during the Neolithic period.