At 5:30 a.m. on July 19, police officers knocked on the door of Dov Haiyun, the Conservative rabbi of the Moriah community in Haifa, and took him to the police station for questioning.

How did this come about? In addition to civil courts, the Israel Police also serve religious courts. When a religious court submits a complaint, the police can detain the suspect for questioning and, if need be, arrest him. In the Kafkaesque case of Rabbi Haiyun, the Haifa Rabbinical Court complained that Haiyun had officiated a marriage for a woman who was forbidden to marry, and did not report the marriage to the rabbinate.

The rabbi is a well-known and well-connected person. He managed to contact Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit, who directed the police to release him. The questioning will take place at another time, but the incident exposed one of the most embarrassing aspects of Israeli democracy: that religious matrimony laws are also part of the state's canon.

The Turks started it. The Ottoman Empire ruled over this piece of land from 1516 to 1917. It did so by means of local religious leaders, who represented their communities and could convince those communities to agree to the whims of the sultans and Turkish overlords. It was a convenient arrangement for the empire, and convenient for the religious leaders.