The late Jerusalem-based rabbi Adin Steinsalz was wont to refer to Jewry as a meta-misphocha—a family beholden to a divinely revealed law. In the traditional Jewish lexicon, one speaks of the House of Israel. In Kinship, Law and Politics: An Anatomy of Belonging Joseph David explores with a finely grained analytical lens the dialectic between scriptural exegesis and protean social realities determining the criteria of familial affiliation, between consanguineous and spiritual belonging.

David’s point of departure is a critical examination of the catenary theory of forbidden marriages, specifically the debates among Karite Judaic sages advocating and opposing catenary conceptions of marriage, and thus kinship. Reaching back to eighth-century Persia, the Karites rejected rabbinic elaborative interpretations of biblical law and insisted on a literal reading of scripture. Accordingly, regarding the Talmudic hermeneutic of analogical deduction as sacrilegious, they held that it could not be applied to the biblical injunctions against incest as delineated in Leviticus 18. They thus averred that the scriptural commandment “Therefor shall a man … cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh” (Genesis 2:24, King James Version) was to be understood literally, leading them to conclude that the carnal union of marriage broadened the bonds of kinship to embrace the bride’s kin, her sister ipso facto became the groom’s sister, her daughter of a previous marriage became his daughter et cetera and vice versa. This led to a constant widening of catenary or chain of forbidden marriages. Karite literalism, however, begot the paradox of extending the ambit of kinship while at the same time delimiting the scope of procreation.

Eleventh century Karite exegetical scholars increasingly realized that the constricting consequence of the catenary conception of kinship threatened the demographic continuity of the community. David observes that “the eventual rejection of the catenary theory resulted not only from social duress and constraints or from the style of religious legal scholarship in vogue, but also (and no less) from a deep change in consciousness and a transformation in the conception of kinship.” (56). To probe the depths of this transformation of familial membership, David casts his explanatory web to consider cognate conceptions of kinship in ancient Greek philosophy, Roman Catholic canon law, Talmudic law, and Islamic doctrines, as well as cultural anthropology. Based on this stunningly erudite comparative sweep, David develops a heuristically nuanced taxonomy of conceptions of nomocentric or law-based religious belonging. This allows him to trace the evolving spiritualization of kinship within Judaism whereby “belonging to law” (19–20) would be increasingly defined theologically, rather than by purely primordial, consanguineal, ethnic kinship.

The concluding chapters of David’s anatomy of belonging are devoted to the challenge that the liberal political order poses to the meta-family, kinship grounded in religious law. The emergence of the modern liberal state, primed by its foundational ethic of individual autonomy, provided new legal and emotive experiences of belonging independent of religious membership. Liberalism, David observes, “must [thus] be understood as the manifestation of a liberation movement and thus inherently iconoclastic—[that is] containing an element that deconstructs the sources of authority, stability, and security enjoyed by the institutions of preliberal society, among them the family” (132). The resulting desacralization of the family, he contends, “remains an unmet challenge looming before modern liberal sensibilities” (132). For hitherto the traditional family had been the bastion of stability, security, and an authoritative, coherent set of values.

Yet, all is not lost. For David discerns a dialectic that endows the family with continued relevance for the liberal political order. Through the separation of the public and the private, whereby religion is relegated to the latter, the family, as David approvingly citing the cultural anthropologist Talal Asad argues, “acquires a new salience” (127).Footnote ¹ The familial home nurtures an ethos that prepares one to partake constructively in the public, political sphere. David endorses the psychological view that family life contributes decisively to “the formation of the individual’s moral personality,” promoting an ethics of care, and the attendant alertness to call for justice and solidarity (129). Fostered by parental love, the ethos of care engenders, David underscores, “the necessary skills for life and for interactions with others in the social and political realms” (128).

David implicitly posits an analogy between the nuclear family and the meta-misphocha, the religious community conceived as a family (defined by an extended web of kinship), which is governed not only by affective bonds of care and solidarity but also by religious, theological commitments that generate theologically inflected axiologies—values that promote “a conception of the right” (130). These values, however, may not be compatible with the regnant values of the liberal political order nor of those affirmed by autonomous individuals. In voicing this caveat, if but in pianissimo, I highlight what I regard to be the more fundamental issue, namely the epistemic limitations of David’s “phenomenology of the ethics of care” (129).

In response to the desacralization of the family as the bastion of “authority, stability and security” (132), a panoply of political movements—on the Left and Right—have emerged to offer individuals adrift in the uncertain waters of the modern experience a home, a camaraderie of care, and the warmth of mutual regard. Each of these movements—at the extreme, Fascist and Communist—are inspired by visions of the good. The phenomenological similarity of mass movements was already poignantly noted by the French savant Gustave Le Bon in his work of 1895, Psychologie des Foules. Footnote ² What distinguishes them, indeed, is their respective visions of the good. What, then, is called for is an Ideologiekritik, a critical objective analysis of the ideologically or theologically determined values and intimations of the summum bonum.

Parenthetically, it should also be noted that one may have a religious identity—be it Jewish, Muslim, Christian, or Buddhist—but find the prevailing institutional configurations of his or her religious community to be incompatible with one’s understanding of the tradition’s teachings and values, and thus choose not to belong. In a sequel to Kinship, Law and Politics, David will surely bring to bear his supple intellect and unfailing perspicuous analytical acumen to address the methodological desideratum of an objective perusal and evaluation of contemporary religious ideologies.