The Druze community certainly stands as one of the most fascinating Middle-Eastern religious minority. For long, the secrecy of their religious beliefs has stirred the imagination of western travelers and caused accusations from their neighbors. Today, the Druze community is split between Lebanon, Syria, and Israel. One is prone to question their communal political line for they never claim nationalism nor a recognition of their particular. Instead, each local community seems to have developed a different way to relate to the authority of the State they happen to belong to. This thesis offers a thorough exploration of the social organization of the Druze in Israel. It argues that the specific play between the mundane realm and the religious organization based on initiation and encompassing forms of ascetism allows a very specific way to exist in a modern and somehow alien state, while retreating inside its own identity and territorial belonging (a cluster of villages in the northern slope of Galilee). This thesis also demonstrates that religion is not a mere question of beliefs, dogma or law, but rather a matter of everyday interactions where the religious references literally woven the entire social structure. Very different in this regard from their neighbors who invests ritual of commemoration and foundation and develop elaborated exegesis of their sacred texts, the Druzes value repeated mundane actions performed by their members to perpetuate their identity.
