Map­ping Jew­ish Anti-Cler­ic­al­ism in a Post-Sec­u­lar World

The Hebrew term Rabbanut stand for more than the person of a rabbi. Actually, it comes to embody authority and power of the clergy as a divinely mandated religious institution through which Rabbanut expresses and defines not only the true belief, but also its self-identification as a custodian of the city of God (Israel) and man (the Jew).

In this paper, I shall examine two types of anti-rabbinical or anti-clerical discourse: Secular anti-clericalism of the Israeli Maimonideanism and the religious anti-clericalism of the Israeli Karaites philosophy of law. The epistemological reason for these two models is to debunk the binary opposition of the religious vs the secular.

In this regard, I shall focus on both Yehoshua Leibowitz´s understanding of Maimonides as the enlightened philosopher/jurist in his critic of Religious-Zionism´s political theology, and the Karaites´ critic of the Rabbis’ claim to derive their authority from the Oral Law, which the Karaites reject as Divine.