508 A History of Judaism
followers, who advocated (however optimistically) coexistence with the
non- Jewish inhabitants of Judaea and Samaria, the Kach party founded
by Kahane sought the mass expulsion of Arabs from both Israel and the
occupied territories.
Kahane had been trained in Talmud in the haredi Mir yeshivah in
Brooklyn, but this new ideology derived more from the political atmos-
phere in right- wing circles in the United States during the Cold War than
from local support among haredim in Israel and, despite the halakhic
strictness adopted by some of his followers, his teachings can be seen,
like those of Kook, as a distinctive response to the spread of liberal
assumptions in other strands of Judaism in the late twentieth century.
His religious outlook, in which Zionist political ideals predominated,
might be better described as Zionist religion than as religious Zionism.
The yeshivah he opened in 1987 for teaching what he claimed as ‘the
authentic Jewish idea’ was funded by American Jews, and there was a
flavour of the Wild West in the establishment of Jewish outposts sur-
rounded by a Palestinian population deemed intrinsically hostile. Within
Israel, support for Kach came less from within the haredi community
than from working- class Sephardi Jews. The haredim, including other
haredi Zionists who were prepared to commit to the state’s institutions,
were generally unimpressed by Kahane’s ostentatious commitment to
religious values as demonstrated by his refusal to take the standard oath
on his election to the Knesset without adding a verse from Psalms to
indicate the priority of Torah over secular laws. His parliamentary
speeches were boycotted by other members of the Knesset, and when an
amendment to the basic constitutional law of the country was passed in
1985 to disbar racist candidates, Kahane found himself unable to run for
election when they were next held, in 1988. The political heat he en -
gendered was demonstrated by the extraordinary size of the crowd
which turned out for his funeral in Jerusalem, in November 1990, after
he had been shot dead, by an Egyptian American, in a hotel in Manhattan
following a speech to haredim from Brooklyn.^15
Kahane’s audience had little in common (beyond a conviction that
they were devoted to the Torah) with a small group on the fringes of the
haredim, Neturei Karta (‘The Guardians of the City’) of Jerusalem, who
refuse to recognize the existence, let alone the authority, of the secular
State of Israel. Neturei Karta split from the haredi confederation of
Agudat Israel in 1938, claiming, on the authority of a bon mot in the
Palestinian Talmud, that the real protection of a community comes not
from its military guards but from ‘the scribes and scholars’. Neturei