NEWS: Bibliography of the History of Israeli Law

(Source: TAU)

We learned that the Berg Institute at TAU recently completed an update of the bibliography of the history of Israeli law, which can be found here.

Suggestions for additional sources are appreciated, and can be sent to berg@post.tau.ac.il.

BOOK: Steve E. ZIPPERSTEIN, Law and the Arab-Israeli Conflict : The Trials of Palestine (London: Routledge, 2020). ISBN 9780367435073, $35.96

(Source: Routledge)

Routledge is publishing a new book on law and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

ABOUT THE BOOK

During the British Mandate for Palestine (1922–1948), Arabs and Jews repeatedly used the law to gain leverage and influence international opinion, especially in three dramatic and largely forgotten trials involving two issues: the interplay between conflicting British promises to the Arabs and Jews during World War I, and the parties’ rights and claims to the Wailing Wall.

Focusing on how all three parties – Arab, Jewish, and British – used the law and the legal process to advance their objectives during the Mandate years, this volume reveals how the parties availed themselves – with varying degrees of success – of the law and the legal process. The book examines various legal arguments they proffered, and how that early tendency to resort to the law as a tool, a resource, and a weapon in the conflict has continued to this day. The research relies almost entirely on primary source documents, including transcripts of the public and secret testimony before the Shaw, Lofgren, and Peel Commissions, diaries, letters, government files, and other original sources.

This study explores the origins of many of the fundamental legal arguments in the Arab–Israeli conflict that prevail to this day. Filling a gap in research, this is a key text for scholars and students interested in the Arab–Israeli conflict, Lawfare, and the Middle East.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Steven E. Zipperstein, a former U.S. federal prosecutor, is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Middle East Development at UCLA. He also teaches in UCLA’s Global Studies program and School of Public Affairs, and as a Visiting Professor at Tel Aviv University Law School.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction  1. McMahon-Hussein, Balfour, and the Legality of the Jewish National Home  2. The Wailing Wall – Conflicting Legal Claims  3. The Shaw Commission  4. The Lofgren Commission  5. The Peel Commission  6. The Early Legal Battles and Their Relevance Today  Conclusion

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BOOK: Nir KEDAR, Law and Identity in Israel : A Century of Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). ISBN 9781108484350, £ 85.00

(Source: CUP)

Cambridge University Press has published a book on law and identity in Israel.

ABOUT THE BOOK

What makes Israeli law Israeli? Why is the word 'Jewish' almost entirely absent from Israeli legislation? How did Israel succeed in eluding a futile and dangerous debate over identity, and construct a progressive, independent, original and sophisticated legal system? Law and Identity in Israel attempts to answer these questions by looking at the complex bond between Zionism and the Jewish culture. Forging an original and 'authentic' Israeli law that would be an expression and encapsulation of Israeli-Jewish identity has been the goal of many Jewish and Zionist jurists as well as public leaders for the past century. This book chronicles and analyzes these efforts, and in the process tackles the complex meaning of Judaism in modern times as a religion, a culture, and a nationality. Nir Kedar examines the challenges and difficulties of expressing Judaism, or transplanting it into, the laws of the state of Israel.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nir Kedar, Bar-Ilan University, Israel

Nir Kedar is a Professor of law and history at Bar Ilan University, Israel and the Vice President for Academic Affairs of Sapir College in Israel. His main fields of interest are modern legal history, legal and political theory and comparative law. He has published five books and numerous articles including, Mamlakhtiyut: David Ben-Gurion's Civic Thought (Hebrew) (2009), which won the 2009 Shapiro Prize for Best Book on Israel.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: law as an expression of Jewish culture

Part I. Seeking to Fashion National Law:

1. Law and culture in early Zionist literature

2. The Hebrew peace courts: the Yishuv judicial system that failed

3. The Hebrew law society: an abortive attempt to fashion a Jewish-Hebrew national code of law

4. Why a Jewish-Hebrew system of law was not instituted at independence

5. A Hebrew constitution for the Jewish state: how did the cultural dispute prevent the promulgation of a written constitution

6. Jewish law and legislation in Israel

Part II. The Resurgence of Cultural Conflict:

7. Jewish heritage and a Jewish democratic state: the identity discourse returns to the legal debate

8. The identity turn and the Jewish and democratic state

Part III. Zionism, Democracy, Law, and Culture:

9. Zionism: making and preserving Hebrew culture

10. Israeli law as a lieu de mémoire of national identity and culture

Conclusion: list of legal cases.

More info here

BOOK: Alexander KAYE, The Invention of Jewish Theocracy The Struggle for Legal Authority in Modern Israel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). ISBN 9780190922740, $40.00

(Source: OUP)

Oxford University Press is publishing a new book on the tension between secular politics and religious fundamentalism in Israeli legal history.

ABOUT THE BOOK

The tension between secular politics and religious fundamentalism is a problem shared by many modern states. This is certainly true of the State of Israel, where the religious-secular schism provokes conflict at every level of politics and society. Driving this schism is the idea of the halakhic state, the demand by many religious Jews that Israel should be governed by the law of the Torah as interpreted by Orthodox rabbis. Understanding this idea is a priority for scholars of Israel and for anyone with an interest in its future. The Invention of Jewish Theocracy is the first book in any language to trace the origins of the idea, to track its development, and to explain its crucial importance in Israel's past and present. The book also shows how the history of this idea engages with burning contemporary debates on questions of global human rights, the role of religion in Middle East conflict, and the long-term consequences of European imperialism.

The Invention of Jewish Theocracy is an intellectual history, based on newly discovered material from numerous Israeli archives, private correspondence, court records, and lesser-known published works. It explains why the idea of the halakhic state emerged when it did, what happened after it initially failed to take hold, and how it has regained popularity in recent decades, provoking cultural conflict that has severely shaken Israeli society. The book's historical analysis gives rise to two wide-reaching insights. First, it argues that religious politics in Israel can be understood only within the context of the largely secular history of European nationalism and not, as is commonly argued, as an anomalous exception to it. It shows how even religious Jews most opposed to modern political thought nevertheless absorbed the fundamental assumptions of modern European political thought and reread their own religious traditions onto that model. Second, it demonstrates that religious-secular tensions are built into the intellectual foundations of Israel rather than being the outcome of major events like the 1967 War. These insights have significant ramifications for the understanding of the modern state. In particular, the account of the blurring of the categories of "secular" and "religious" illustrated in the book are relevant to all studies of modern history and to scholars of the intersection of religion and human rights.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Assistant Professor, Department of Near East and Judaic Studies; Karl, Harry, and Helen Stoll Assistant Chair of Israel Studies, Brandeis University

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction. The Halakhic State
Chapter 1. The Pluralistic Roots of Religious Zionism
Chapter 2. Isaac Herzog before Palestine
Chapter 3. A Constitution for Israel According to the Torah
Chapter 4. Modernizing the Chief Rabbinate
Chapter 5. Failure and Resistance
Chapter 6. "Gentile Courts" in a Jewish State
Chapter 7. The Persistence of Jewish Theocracy
Bibliography

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BOOK: Dan PORAT, Bitter Reckoning Israel Tries Holocaust Survivors as Nazi Collaborators (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019). ISBN 9780674988149, €27.00

(Source: HUP)

Harvard University Press has published a new book on the kapo trials in Israeli legal history.  

ABOUT THE BOOK

Beginning in 1950, the state of Israel prosecuted and jailed dozens of Holocaust survivors who had served as camp kapos or ghetto police under the Nazis. At last comes the first full account of the kapo trials, based on records newly declassified after forty years.

In December 1945, a Polish-born commuter on a Tel Aviv bus recognized a fellow rider as the former head of a town council the Nazis had established to manage the Jews. When he denounced the man as a collaborator, the rider leapt off the bus, pursued by passengers intent on beating him to death. Five years later, to address ongoing tensions within Holocaust survivor communities, the State of Israel instituted the criminal prosecution of Jews who had served as ghetto administrators or kapos in concentration camps.

Dan Porat brings to light more than three dozen little-known trials, held over the following two decades, of survivors charged with Nazi collaboration. Scouring police investigation files and trial records, he found accounts of Jewish policemen and camp functionaries who harassed, beat, robbed, and even murdered their brethren. But as the trials exposed the tragic experiences of the kapos, over time the courts and the public shifted from seeing them as evil collaborators to victims themselves, and the fervor to prosecute them abated.

Porat shows how these trials changed Israel’s understanding of the Holocaust and explores how the suppression of the trial records—long classified by the state—affected history and memory. Sensitive to the devastating options confronting those who chose to collaborate, yet rigorous in its analysis, Bitter Reckoning invites us to rethink our ideas of complicity and justice and to consider what it means to be a victim in extraordinary circumstances.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dan Porat is the author of The Boy: A Holocaust Story, which the New York Times called “a gripping, harrowing Holocaust story” and Elie Wiesel praised as “a poignant and riveting investigation.” Porat is a teacher and researcher at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

1. From Revenge to Retribution in Post-Nazi Europe

2. Tensions among Survivors in Mandatory Palestine

3. The Nazis and Nazi Collaborators Punishment Law

4. Preliminary Court Examinations

5. Weighing the Actions of Jewish Collaborators

6. Can a Jewish Kapo Commit a Crime against Humanity?

7. The First Doubts about the Kapo Trials

8. Judging a Nazi and Reframing Collaboration

9. Absolving Ordinary Functionaries

Epilogue

Notes

Acknowledgments

Illustration Credits

Index

More info here

BOOK: Assaf LIKHOVSKI, Tax Law and Social Norms in Mandatory Palestine and Israel (New York: Cambridge University Press), 352 p. ISBN 9781107176294, £ 90

Assaf Likhovski (Tel Aviv University) published Tax Law and Social Norms in Mandatory Palestine and Israel in the “Studies in Legal History” series (Cambridge University Press).

(Image source: CUP)

About the Book:

This book describes how a social-norms model of taxation rose and fell in British-ruled Palestine and the State of Israel in the mid-twentieth century. Such a model, in which non-legal means were used to foster compliance, appeared in the tax system created by the Jewish community in 1940s Palestine and was later adopted by the new Israeli state in the 1950s. It gradually disappeared in subsequent decades as law and its agents, lawyers and accountants, came to play a larger role in the process of taxation. By describing the historical interplay between formal and informal tools for creating compliance, Tax Law and Social Norms in Mandatory Palestine and Israel sheds new light on our understanding of the relationship between law and other methods of social control, and reveals the complex links between taxation and citizenship.

About the author:

Assaf Likhovski is a professor of law and legal history at Tel-Aviv University Faculty of Law. He is the author of Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine (2006), which was awarded the Yonathan Shapiro Best Book Award in Israel Studies.

                                      
Table of contents:

Introduction: the intimate fiscal state
Part I. The Rise of Income Taxation:
1. Before the income tax: Jewish Ottoman, and early mandatory taxation
2. The introduction of income taxation in mandatory Palestine
Part II. The Ascendancy of Social Norms:
3. Taxation without law: the Jewish voluntary tax system
4. Law and social norms in early Israeli taxation
Part III. The Transformation of Israeli Taxation and its Law:
5. The rise of tax experts: accountants, lawyers, and economists
6. The transformation of tax law: doctrinal and legislative changes

More information:

http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2017/07/forgotten-lives-and-universal-lessons/

BIBLIOGRAPHY: David Berg Foundation for Law and History, Tel Aviv University (bibliography on Israeli legal history)

(image source: Tel Aviv University)

David Schorr reports on H-Law that a new bibliography of Israeli legal history has been published by the David Berg Foundation Institute for Law and History at Tel Aviv University.

More information here.