When the State Winks by Michal Kravel-Tovi

Author:Michal Kravel-Tovi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

Uncertainty, Suspicion, and Trust

During my fieldwork more than a few court agents expressed painful awareness of their imperfect ability to become acquainted with conversion candidates. “Tell me, how can I know if someone is ready for conversion in one hour?” said Judge Rabbi Shemi. Rabbi Zvi, another judge, confided, “I never met this person before. I’ve only read about her in a file, so there’s no way I can know for sure who she really is.” Rabbi Peres, a senior representative of the chief rabbi on matters of conversion, employed a somewhat Foucauldian technology trope to question the prospect of successfully evaluating a candidate’s genuineness: “How could Rabbi Cohen know this convert? How could he know if she is really sincere? What do you think, that he has some kind of mind-reading technology?”

Clearly lacking such technology and working under bureaucratic conditions creating distance and uncertainty, court agents often developed attitudes of suspicion and trust. Both strategies were commonly enacted toward the same candidate, by the same judicial panel, even by the same judge. These strategies were by no means mutually exclusive. Though contradictory in nature, suspicion and trust share a common tenet. Both dispositions constitute assumptions or conjectures about others’ conduct and equally stem from an inability to fully know that conduct or foresee its future. In other words, suspicion and trust are modes of knowing; they are means for bridging gaps in contexts of incomplete knowledge.

Talal Asad writes: “All judicial and policing systems of the modern state presuppose organized suspicion, [and they] incorporate margins of uncertainty” (Asad 2004:285). Several compelling ethnographies of suspicion, all of which focus on encounters between state professionals and “insufficiently known” individuals, trace this institutional connection between uncertainties and suspicion (see also Sztompka 1999:67). For example, working in terrains of Greek psychiatry, Elizabeth Davis identifies the clinic as a space of knowledge production wherein fragile psychiatric truths are generated. She describes how “the problem of ‘the unknown,’ rooted in the unreliability of speech” (Davis 2010:138), creates deeply entrenched suspicions toward patients. Among migrant workers in contemporary Russia, Madeleine Reeves examines the uncertainty surrounding their being authentically documented, whereby “suspicion itself becomes the dominant mode of governing uncertainty” (Reeves 2013:512). Examining political asylum courts in France, Carolina Kobelinsky (2015) demonstrates how suspicion toward asylum requests plays a central role in the ways adjudication procedures unfold. In this legal context, where truth is defined in legal terms and regarded as something that can and should be verified, and yet a dearth of empirical evidence for determining truth exists, judges and other asylum court representatives resort to suspicion as a compensating strategy.

Likewise, suspicion was a common point of departure for the conversion judges and court representatives I met during my fieldwork. Suspicion constituted a working tool, a predisposition that from the outset led them to consider the possibility that candidates might lie or pretend. Suspicion was a highly routinized and normalized strategy court agents learned to increasingly employ as they grew professionally. As I will show later in this chapter, candidates’ court performances were hardly ever taken at face value.

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