Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic research on Israel's pro-Jewish conversion policy, this paper traces the state's preoccupations with its impending demographic future, revealing how the temporal schemes of emergency underwrite Israel’s intervention in the religious status of its national subjects.

Paper long abstract:

While scholars have focused heavily on Israel's contested territorial politics, its temporal work as a Jewish nation-state has been largely overlooked. I attend here to this lacuna; the Israeli state, I contend, strives to secure its Jewish future by governing the Jewish future of its subjects. Based on ethnographic research on Israel's pro-Jewish conversion policy, this paper traces the state's preoccupations with its impending future, revealing how these preoccupations underwrite Israel's urgent intervention in the religious status of its national subjects. Locating Jewish conversion policy in the context of the mass immigration of non-Jews from the former Soviet Union, I argue that the state is driven by alarmist discourses regarding its demographic future. In Israel, temporal language clearly captures the existential weight attributed to the issue of conversion. This language frames the issue as "a race against time," or, as one of the conversion agents explained to me: "the story of conversion is the story of Israel's future." Because matrilineal principles govern the transmission of Jewish identity, women feature centrally in this "story" of conversion. After all, Israel assigns women the role of reproducing the state as Jewish. At the nexus of the political and the biological emerges what I call a biopolitical clock: a political clock that takes into account the biologically-related processes of individuals and populations. When the hour-glass of national demography overlaps with the biological clock, together indexing the importance of converting fertile young women, the Israeli state fully realizes the temporal scheme of emergency.