Religious obligation, secular work, and citizenship: The material poverty and spiritual riches of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel

Citizenship ideals in western capitalist countries put great emphasis on the notion that adult individuals should be self-sufficient, meeting their own material needs through income from paid employment.  These ideals conflict with the religious beliefs of certain minority groups whose understanding of religious obligation leads them to reject “profane” work in order to devote themselves fully to religious activities.  The poverty that results from these choices can then become a matter for welfare state institutions – and the assertion that this poverty results from choice points to the controversy that typically follows from providing public support in such instances.

This paper explores these issues by analyzing the situation of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel.  In these groups men spend many years studying in yeshiva instead of finding paid work; while their wives sometimes work, they lack advanced education and their wages are low, and in any event they shun contraception, have very high fertility rates (mainly by choice), and thus have intermittent employment at best.  These are large families with little or no income from work; they survive on state support gained via the power of their parliamentary representatives as “swing parties” in successive governments.  These arrangements are bitterly resented by the secular (tax-paying) Israeli population, who sometimes express their opposition in language that bears traces of anti-Semitism (e.g. “parasites”). 

This situation points to important questions about the rights of religious minorities.  Do such groups have a right to expect public support (i.e., money) when their religiously prescribed way of life excludes work and thus conflicts with secular notions of citizenship?  To what extent must religious minorities accommodate their religious views and practices to the demands of secular norms and institutions?  This paper addresses these questions via comparison with other examples (including counterfactuals) in which need/poverty is arguably rooted in choice.