‘National mission’: biopolitics, non-Jewish immigration and Jewish conversion policy in contemporary Israel

Abstract

Abstract A large number of non-Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union have arrived in Israel since the late 1980s. This article explores how the Israeli State has responded to this perceived demographic threat by endorsing a pro-Jewish conversion policy targeted at this population of new citizens. By analysing a variety of ethnographic and textual materials, I trace the organizational processes and discursive practices through which conversion has been crafted into a ‘national mission’: an all-encompassing state endeavour whose impetus is a national-Zionist biopolitics. The Foucauldian concept of biopolitics offers a novel way to understand the interface between religious conversion and the nation-state. Specifically, it positions the concept of population as a primary analytical category, thereby enabling us to understand religious conversion as a mechanism of national population policy.