61 Winter 2026 t the core of Simon Rabinovitch’s Sovereignty & Religious Freedom lies a compelling and original claim: that the dilemmas posed by the “Jewish question” — the intertwined legal and political meanings of Jewish collective identity — have not been resolved by liberal emancipation in Western democracies or Jewish sovereignty in the State of Israel. The claim runs counter to the dominant postwar narrative, which sees liberal democracy and Israeli sovereignty as two complementary answers to the question. Rabinovitch shows that the issues remain because Jewish law and the cultural norms that flow from it stubbornly resist assimilation into the logic of state sovereignty. Thus, over the past two centuries the same conceptual issues resurface across radically different legal and political regimes even as each is transformed by its local context. Rabinovitch’s central contribution lies in placing a wide range of historical episodes — from imperial, liberal, and nationalist legal orders — within a single comparative framework. Drawing on case studies from Tsarist Russia, colonial North Africa, and Mandatory Palestine, as well as more recent controversies in South Africa, the United Kingdom, North America, and modern Israel, he traces the same foundational dilemmas: How should modern states handle communal religious norms and authority that cannot be reduced to the rights of individual believers? Who gets to define Jewish identity? And, most sharply, how can Jewish law and communal enforcement exist meaningfully within — or even alongside — a state’s sovereign legal system? Although some of the better-known controversies have been covered elsewhere, Rabinovitch enriches the literature by spotlighting episodes that are lesser-known to American and Israeli readers yet are legally revealing and analytically rich. In Chapter 2 he introduces the Enos Affair in colonial Algeria of the late 19th century, which illustrates the ambiguous status of Algerian Jewry and the contradictions embedded in French imperial policy. Although France dismantled Jewish communal courts in Algeria following colonization, it retained a regime of ethno-religious legal pluralism that treated Jews, Muslims, and French settlers as distinct legal subjects. When ÉlieLéon Enos, an Algerian-born Jew educated in Paris, was denied admission to the bar on the grounds that his status as an Israelite indigèn (Jewish native) excluded him from French citizenship, he challenged the decision in court. His case forced French jurists to confront the incompatibility between universal republican principles espoused in France and the differentiated legal categories of the empire. Rabinovitch skillfully shows how the shifting construction of Jewish identity exposed the impossibility of maintaining a unified legal system across both metropole and colony — particularly one that classified Algerian Jews as a separate national group from the colonizing French and the indigenous Muslims. Parallel tensions play out in modern democratic regimes. In Israel, the landmark Brother Daniel case of 1962, and the “Who is a Jew” Shalit case of 1970, reveal the state’s struggle to reconcile secular-democratic ideals with either the religious or national definitions of Jewishness embedded in various institutions of the Israeli state. In the UK, the Jewish Free School (JFS) case pitted anti-discrimination law against the UK Chief Rabbinate’s authority to define Jewish status for admission to a state-funded Jewish school. These cases demonstrate that even in liberal democracies, the state cannot avoid adjudicating religious identity when it intersects with the public fisc. When Jewish identity has consequences, legal conflict is inevitable. Rabinovitch turns to marriage and divorce law, exploring how state courts across different regimes intersect with halakhic family law. In Tsarist Russia, for instance, Jewish spouses who converted to Russian Orthodoxy sometimes sought divorces from their Jewish partners. Since divorce was generally not permitted under Orthodox Church law (which applied to marriages in the empire) exceptions were carved out for converts whose spouses refused to join the new faith. Rabinovitch reconstructs the jurisdictional confusion and conceptual entanglements that emerged when Jewish, Russian, and OrthodoxChristian legal norms collided. In another case, a widow Chaim Saiman A The New Jewish Question: Simon Rabinovitch’s Sovereignty & Religious Freedom: A Jewish History New Haven: Yale University Press (2024, 312 pp.)
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