The pre-'67 utopia

I have made mention before of the tendency of many old-timers in Israel to bemoan the supposed paradise that was pre-'67 Israel. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in discussions of religious-secular relations. To hear some people talk, you'd think there Israel was a veritable convivencia (like the other supposed paradise in Ummayad Spain) for religious and secular Jews alike. Everyone got along just swimmingly. There were no controversies over the forced secular education for Eastern Jews who came here. The 1958 "Who is a Jew" controversy which reverbrates to this day never took place. The seeds for the infamous Langer controversy were not sown prior to 1967.

No-one had to fight tooth and nail to ensure minimal religious education for those who wanted it and ensure that a religious soldier could serve without eating non-kosher food or doing unnecesarry duties on Shabbat. Everyone was perfectly confident in their religiosity and did not feel the need to hide his kipa by wearing a cap for instance. The oh-so-moderate Mafdal didn't try to insist on seperate IDF units for religious Jews to prevent there being a peer-pressure caused mass defection to the secular side. In fact there was no horadat kipa at all.

Secular Jews, in turn, just loved us. They didn't consider us an anachronism that will die out in a generation or two. When ultra-secular Jews screamed 'religious coercion', they weren't referring to the moderate Mafdal with its religious legislation, they only meant the Charedim with the Shabbat riots. Many secular Jews weren't taught to despise the very use of the word "Jew" and preferred "Hebrew" or "Israeli", becoming increasingly alienated from, and disgusted with their own cultural heritage. In fact between 1948 and 1967 the entire WASP population (Western, Ashkenazi, Secular, Protectionist) was just waiting for some form of "Aron Sefarim Yehudi" type feel-good cultural Judaism.

I'm sure you've understood by now that I consider the above description to be a load of hogwash. Nostalgia is a particularly insidious and decietful illusion, possessing as it does a kind of comforting fantasy-land. But this particular fantasy has little basis in reality, and no amount of selective memory of isolated cases can change that.

To those who will reply that things were still better then, I will say this. Let us agree with this assertion for the sake of argument (for I do not consider it to be true). It is like the incessant comparing of Jews under Muslim and Christian rule, where the former mostly humiliated us and ocassionaly killed us and the latter did both in spades. It's like saying it's better to be crippled than dead. Obviously if given a choice many would choose the former, but only an idiot would say they preferred this option to actually being able to walk.

To those of you who are academically-minded and you still think life was perfect in that time - here's your chance. Conduct a thorough social-historical investigation of religious life in Israel between 1948 and 1967. Don't cover just the political aspects, but also social interaction - both contacts and conflicts. Did everyone mingle freely or were there boundaries? Did everyone always just "agree to disagree"?

There are many more questions, but what I'm looking for here is proof, rock-solid, incontravertible historical evidence that there was peace in the land between religious and secular Jews before the Six Day War. I want to also know that this was not due to the overweening submissiveness of the former or the hope of the latter that we'll just die out.

Until then, the above post is my story, and I'm sticking to it.