L'ethnicisation du champ éducatif religieux en Israël : l'exemple de Petah-Tikva

Abstract

By redefining their ethno-religious identity, the religious education network established in Israel at the end of the 1980s by the ultraorthodox Sephardic party, Shas, has played a major role in drawing a portion of the Jews who originated in Arab-Mulsim countries (Mizrahim) together into a community. An analysis inspired by the sociology of social movements sheds light on the manner in which this process of communitarianization has taken place. The Shas Party was able to acquire the political weight necessary to ensure the rapid growth of its school network thanks to structures of political opportunity that facilitated the emergence of this collective action in both the political and educational fields. Yet it was the reorganization of the educational field that more specifically permitted the mobilization of identity to take place through schools. Born of the discrepancy between a discourse that supported ethnically mixed schools and practices running counter to it, the crisis of legitimacy in the public school system allowed the Shas Party to implement efforts to redefine the categories of Israeli identity. For a growing number of families, the result has been to make the Party’s school network an alternative space propitious to the communitarianization of the eastern ethnicity. &#9632