Performing Law Into Being: How One Religious Community Remade State Law

Abstract

This paper considers the case of the Karaite sect in modern-day Israel as an instance where an insular and marginalized religious community reshaped official law through its members’ religious performances. Despite their failing political and legal campaigns to change Israeli family law to accommodate their distinct Judaism, the religiously committed Karaite community brought about official legal change. They did so by mimicking official law, embedding it into their sacred order, and living their original jurisprudence daily. Drawing on primary historical sources, this study reenacts the ways by which official state law and local religious law reciprocally change each other under a plural normative setting.