became the core of the Israeli political opposition. Menachem Begin, the
principal disciple of Jabotinsky and the leader of the Irgun, led the opposition
party until his election as prime minister in 1977.
The establishment of the State of Israel marked the fulfillment of Zionism
and its multifaceted nationalist aims. Israel became a refuge for Jews around
the world. The 100,000 Jews interned on Cyprus were welcomed immedi-
ately. During the five years after independence, thousands of Jews from Arab
countries immigrated to Israel.
This “ingathering of the exiled” was a cause of great celebration and tri-
umph, but also posed the first domestic challenges to the fledgling state,
first and foremost over the question of Jewish identity in the Jewish state.
The Law of Return, enacted by the Israeli parliament in 1950, granted auto-
matic citizenship to any Jew who immigrated to Israel; non-Jewish
immigrants had to follow a more conventional path to citizenship. An early
test of this law, and one of the first decisive judicial cases that came before
the Israeli High Court, involved a Carmelite monk named Brother Daniel,
born a Polish Jew named Oswald Rufeisen. Rufeisen was raised a Jew and
embraced Zionism before being forced to go into hiding during the Nazi
occupation of Poland. Rufeisen was hidden by a Polish Catholic family and
eventually converted to Catholicism. He remained a Catholic even after the
end of the war, and eventually entered the priesthood. He became a monk
and was renamed Brother Daniel.
During the 1950s, he was assigned to a monastery near Haifa. At this
point, Brother Daniel claimed Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return,
explaining that he was Jewish by nationality and Catholic by religion. The
case came before the Supreme Court in 1958. The court denied Brother
Daniel’s petition, defining Jews as people whom most Jews regard as Jewish.
In other words, because most Jews, whether secular or religiously observant,
regarded a Jew who converted to Christianity as non-Jewish, Brother Daniel
could not claim to be Jewish.
Although an apparent setback to the early Zionist secular understanding
of Jewish identity, this case underscored the blurring of the lines between sec-
ular Zionism and traditional Judaism. This reflected a subtle but crucial
element of Israeli society. Between the ranks of the avowedly secular and fer-
vently religious were many Israelis whose Jewishness was a composite of
religious and secular elements.
In some sense, this blurring of the lines was furthered by the influx of non-
Ashkenazic Jews from the Arab states. Zionism, after all, was an Ashkenazic
invention, and the response of Ashkanzic Jews to the particular circumstances
of the late nineteenth century. Jews in Arab lands had always lived comfort-
ably between the religious and non-religious dimensions of Jewish life; thus,
incorporating secular Zionist views into their Jewish outlook was less of a dis-
junctive experience than it was for many Ashkenazic Jews, for whom
accepting Zionism meant rejecting Jewish tradition.
Jews in the postwar world 235