The Salo Baron Prize for 2020 was awarded to:

Alexander Kaye,The Invention of Jewish Theocracy: The Struggle for Legal Authority in Modern Israel (Oxford University Press)

Alexander Kaye’s book explores the development of the idea of a theocratic halakhic state.  While most historians have claimed that the Six Day War was the turning point in transforming religious Zionists from pragmatic collaborators with the secular state into theocratic activists, Kaye argues that the demand for a halakhic state originated in the 1940s.  Kaye focuses on the writings of Isaac Herzog, the Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of Palestine from 1937 and, after 1948, the new State of Israel. Kaye demonstrates that Herzog’s argument for a halakhic state was based less on rabbinic sources than on legal theories of modern nationalism. In pre-modern rabbinic discussions of the relationship of Torah to secular law, most commentators favored legal pluralism. But modern theories called for a unitary law emanating from the state. Herzog applied these theories to a Jewish state, whose unitary law, he thought, should be the halakhah. The rejection of the secular Jewish state and its courts that Kaye finds in Herzog and some of his contemporaries was thus present even as the state came into being in 1948.  Kaye’s book illuminates the complex and, at times, paradoxical way religious Zionists have thought and continue to think about the Israeli state. 

The American Academy for Jewish Research (www.aajr.org) is the oldest professional organization of Judaica scholars in North America.  Its membership represents the most senior figures in the field.

The Baron Prize honors the memory of the distinguished historian Salo W. Baron, a long-time president of the AAJR, who taught at Columbia University for many decades.  It is one of the signal honors that can be bestowed on a young scholar in Jewish Studies and a sign of the excellence, vitality, and creativity of the field.