Thus far we have seen that Israeli Masortiyut draws on three different circles of discourse: the Mizrahi-Masorti circle that developed on the basis of Middle Eastern/North African Jewish heritage; the secular-Masorti circle that developed in the wake of secular Jewish renewal from the 1970s on; and the religious-Masorti circle that emerged within Religious Zionism and aspired to connect religiosity with Israeliness.123 These circles of discourse developed concurrently, as part of a quest for Jewish common ground and a desire to soften the prevailing strict ideological sectoralism.
These three Masorti discourses belong to the same Israeli-Masorti space, as they all support a common cultural, national, and social platform with regard to the character of the state, the attitude to be taken toward all Jewish subgroups, the idea of making Jewish tradition present within Israeliness and of reformulating it in a spirit of interpretive autonomy. We have also seen that the thinkers who are formulating the aforementioned discourses have a broad ideological-cultural basis, making it possible to view all of them as products of the same multisectoral cultural movement. However, this is a space of multiplicity that still includes identities that are separate from each other. At the data level this heterogeneity stands out, given that the Masorti public is the only one that encompasses major disagreements on an array of basic issues as discussed above, such as civil equality, religion-state relations, and attitudes toward Jewish tradition itself. In this section we will briefly look at the roots of the difference between the discourses. We will also examine differing approaches to the core of the new Masortiyut and to the boundaries of tradition.