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1.3 Evolving Research Questions

When I set out in 1996 to study the movement from a social science point of view, I felt uneasy about limiting research questions. To begin with, I was too curious to ask for only one thing. Yet even more important, I regarded myself as still too ignorant to jump head over into a particularistic study of a phenomenon whose parts I did not even yet know (Swanborn 1987: 325). I feared looking for emic irrelevant things, because I felt like walking into a white area on Israel's social science map. Sobel's „Thirteenth Tribe” (Sobel 1974) I „discovered” only on my last day of my last stay in Israel. Weiner's „Wild Goats of Ein Gedi” (Weiner 1961) I even found only afterwards on a web-site from where I could order a copy. Since they wrote, nobody appeared to have cared to present a thorough English study of the movement from a social science point of view (Sobel and Beit-Hallahmi 1991: 210, 216).

In 1995, I was interested in how the movement looked like at all. From where did it come and where was it going? How big was it? What formed its culture? How did its symbolic structure, culture, shape its social structure, its organizing? Like walking through an alien landscape, I was not sure if I really understood what I saw (Lewis 1965: 52-53). Were things what they appeared to me? Could I trust my linking of appearance and content? What did I know yet about contents, held beliefs, values and norms of the movements parts? As I learned to see, I perceived a fourfold Messianic Jewish typology that structured my further study. In section 1.2.2 I unfolded it already.

In 1996, I wore this typology and Droogers' framework for the study of religion, which I explained in section 1.2.3, as theoretical reading glasses on the tip of my nose. Both instruments should focus my study. Still I needed the liberty to look over these glasses, quickly to switch views on a reality that I yet learned to perceive. The fourfold typology helped me to distinguish and compare the movement's parts, and to sense their relations. Droogers' framework sharpened my view for inherent dynamics, in supernatural interaction, in internal structures, of the movement as a whole and in its parts, and in its and their parts' relationship to their environments. His dialectic framework and the fourfold typology rendered a list of questions. The questions concerned the movement's perception of the supernatural and its internal and external social-structural relationships. Who were main players? What events and phenomena shaped the movement? How were the social bodies that comprise the movement organized, internally and externally? How were their relationships to Christian and Jewish entities? Though I carried the list in my luggage and mind, I never took it out visibly. 10The complete list I included as Appendix A1.)

In 1997 I was particularly interested in the movement's congregational synagogal type ( (gimel) and (daleth). I began to perceive them as its most innovative expression. To perceive its meaning in its context, I wondered how the movement's ecclesiastical and synagogal entities compared to and differed from one another. Such interest had to guide me, but still not to restrict me hearing answers to questions I still had to learn to ask. Not only in a social science sense I regarded myself as similar to the fourth son in the Jewish Pesach liturgy, „who does not yet understand to ask” (Brauer 1979: 22, English ed., Fleischer Snow 1989: 7).

After finishing data collection in the field, during the elaborate and time-consuming period of sorting out the collected material, of working out interviews and field notes, new questions and views came up. Obviously I shifted now from an emic approach in the field to an etic approach in the study. The more I went on with analysis and synthesis, the stronger became my need for theories to make sense of and with what I had found. Now I revisited all kinds of theories and concepts. I asked myself if they could possibly explain, or at least shed some light on what I had observed, unravelled and, maybe, hopefully, even understood.

After the preceding explication of the emic fourfold typology of the movement, the modified framework for the study of religion, and how the study evolved, I can finally formulate two guiding questions for this chiefly descriptive essay.

  1. What are the similarities and differences of the four types of groups of the Israeli Messianic Jewish movement, regarding their physical arrangements and their interactions, cultural with the supernatural, and social-structural, internal among and between themselves, and external with the Christian and Jewish community?
  2. How can the movement's supernatural, internal and external relationships be understood in the light of organizational theory and religious anthropology?

The guiding question of this essay is thus not how the movement can be studied and described. For I have explained already above how I studied the movement and the data, which I had collected in the field. I will still further explicate on the methodology of my research and analysis in the following sections of part one of this essay. The first of the two guiding questions leads to the second part of this essay. As I explained in the preface, the body of description and reflection in part two should also be viewed as part of the „conclusion” of this essay. The second question I will answer by considering from various viewpoints the fourfold emic structure of the movement, and its often problematic relation with its environments. That forms part three of my essay, an interpretation of research results, containing also cautious considerations concerning consequences of the movement's situation in its contexts. Before I present the research results in part two and attempt their interpretation in part three, it seems appropriate further to explicate on applied methodologies by which I gained the results and interpretations.