Couples Who Disobeyed the Caste-Like Marital Prohibitions in Israel

Abstract

This article uses a feminist human rights approach and focusses on one of the most painful experiences in intimate relationships, unveiling a hitherto unexplored type of human rights infringement for divorced women, namely the right to establish a family in Israel, purported to be a democratic state. This phenomenon is based on religious marriage rules and prohibitions that include, inter alia, the classification of Jews into 10 hierarchical pedigrees, which are partially equivalent to Indian castes. Owing to this caste-like classification, thousands of couples are proscribed from marrying each other every year in Israel. This article focusses on couples that disobeyed the prohibitions on couples consisting of male Cohanim (descendants of Jewish priests) and divorced women, as one type of forbidden marriage. Four themes emerged from data analysis of narratives of 26 interviewees, which converge to a common motif of the liminality of Cohen-divorcee couples. The article argues that this liminality undermines the basic rationale of the prevailing millet (personal law) system and discusses the implications of this liminality for women’s human rights and religion-state relations.