Jewish secularism

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Not to be confused with Jewish atheism.
For other uses, see Secular Jew (disambiguation).

Ahad Ha'am, one of the most prominent Jewish secularist ideologues

Jewish secularism refers to secularism in a Jewish context, denoting the definition of Jewish identity with little or no attention given to its religious aspects.[1][a] The concept of Jewish secularism first arose in the late 19th century, with its influence peaking during the interwar period.

History

The Jews and secularisation

Part of a series on
Jews and Judaism
Religion
Texts
Tanakh
Talmud
Rabbinic
History
General
Ancient Israel
Second Temple Period
Late Antiquity and Middle Ages
Modern era
Communities
Related groups
Population
Land of Israel
Africa
Asia
Europe
Northern America
Latin America and Caribbean
Oceania
Denominations
Culture
Customs
Music
Art
Cuisine
Literature
Languages
Politics
Jewish political movements
Zionism

The

court Jews entered Christian society.[5]

At the end of the 18th century, communal autonomy was gradually abolished by the rising centralised states of Europe, and with it the authority of rabbis and

divine revelation,[6]
aiming to restore the religion to an ancient, "pure" version, before God's commandments were supposedly corrupted by irrational additions.

Eventually, the constraints of

Mosaic faith". The synagogue, family life and strictly religious questions – the differentiation between "secular" and "religious" spheres, imported from Christianity, was alien to Jewish tradition – were the only venues in which Jewishness could be expressed. The nascent Reform movement radically altered the religion so it could be adapted to modern circumstances. The traditionalists, coalescing into self-aware Orthodoxy, silently tolerated change while turning a blind eye to unprincipled laxity. In modernist Orthodox circles
, acculturation was even lauded.

The scholars of the "

Science of Judaism", who introduced critical academic methods in the study of Jewish history, rebutted traditional interpretation, but were rarely interested in alternatives for the secularised, modern crowd. They even scorned the efforts of religious reform, whether radical or conservative, and many were convinced that Judaism was destined to dissipate; Moritz Steinschneider once commented that their aim was to "duly bury its corpse." Utter religious apathy was common among 19th-century Jews, but it was not accompanied by any positive identity. The children of such people often converted to Christianity.[7][8]

The rise of Jewish secularism

Only in late-19th century Eastern Europe did a new, positive and secular definition of Jewish existence arise. Eastern European Jews, more than 90% of world Jewry at the time, were decidedly unacculturated: In 1897, 97% declared

national movements
coalesced in Eastern Europe, coupled with a literary renaissance of Hebrew and Yiddish. In tandem, young intellectuals advanced a radically new understanding of Jewish identity.

The most prominent of these, who is widely considered as the father of Jewish secularism, was Asher Hirsch Ginsberg, known by his nom de plume

pantheist
. He sees the creativity of the national spirit from within, where the believer only sees a higher power intervening from without.

Ahad Ha'am was not the only one, and far from the most radical, to promulgate a cultural-national conception of Jewishness. His harsh critic

Yiddishism
. With the demise of faith, Zhitlowsky advocated that a monolinguistic Yiddish nation and culture were the future of local Jews, with old traditions serving as folklore to be selectively adopted. Neither he nor his followers ever discussed other Jewish ethnic groups.

Ahad Ha'am, Berdyczewski, Dubnow and Zhitlowsky were only few of the most prominent Jewish secularist ideologues of their age. Hundreds of others, influenced by the major thinkers and supporting the various national movements, were active among the millions in the Pale of Settlement, Poland and the adjacent regions.

Heyday

The new understanding of Jewishness swiftly spread from the intellectuals to the rest of society, into the spheres of popular culture and daily life. As Eastern European Jews were undergoing secularisation and acculturation, in the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and being recognised as a national minority with autonomous rights in the

1911 Zionist Congress. A new literary canon, authored by writers committed to the secular cause, was to provide the people with a Jewish culture that could compete with the Polish or Russian ones. It was supplemented with burgeoning theatre and press scenes, reaching a vast audience. Intellectuals, dedicated to a secular cultural revival, enlisted to reinterpret and reformulate the holidays and other aspects of Jewish tradition: New children's songs, for example, served to remove the old religious narratives and impart new ones, centered on the family or the nation. The secular messages were spread by the modern Jewish schools and youth movements, which catered to hundreds of thousands of pupils.[citation needed
]

The logic of redefining the Jews as a modern nation was extended to the criteria for being a Jew, changing them to ethno-cultural markings. Ahad Ha'am repudiated the idea of

Palestinian Arabs into Jewish society through intermarriage, without conversion. Not a few Yiddishists, like Bundist ideologue A. Litvak (Khayim Yankl Helfand, 1874–1932)[9]), urged that declaring Yiddish as one's mother tongue was the only measure for determining Jewish nationality. Zionist Jakob Klatzkin declared that those who identified with other nations (as did most Western and Central European "citizens of Mosaic faith"), were committing "national apostasy", and were therefore outside the pale of Jewishness.[citation needed
]

Among the millions of Eastern Europeans who immigrated to the United States and other western countries, the new Jewish secularism imported from home continued to prosper. A group of radical intellectuals coalesced in 1915 to found

Passover Haggadah, were supplanted with Yiddish or English editions, emphasising Jewish class consciousness and anti-rabbinism. The dense immigrants' neighbourhoods in New York provided a strong sense of Jewish ethnicity, and an audience for the intellectuals and cultural activists.[citation needed
]

In the Zionist settlement in the Land of Israel, Cultural Zionism, strongly influenced by Ahad Ha'am, was the dominant philosophy[when?]. The highly centralised and ideologically-driven Zionist enterprise in the land, allowed its leaders to rapidly disseminate the intellectual products of their philosophers and thinkers, committed to create a new Jewish culture[when?]. The old holidays were radically refashioned: Hanukkah's religious aspects, centering on the miracle of the oil, were repressed and replaced with an emphasis on national sovereignty and a victory against foreign enemies (circumventing the religious civil war among Jews). The Zionist reappropriation of the Jewish calendar similarly affected all holidays. Those that could serve the national ideals, especially in celebrating military feats or agriculture, were emphasised and cultivated. Those that could not, like Yom Kippur, were marginalised.[citation needed]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Not to be confused with the epithet "secular Jew", which has various meanings in different contexts. A "secular Jew" may be a religious Jew who espouses secularism in a general context; in the 20th century, American rabbis who endorsed strict separation of church and state were the most prominent example of "secular Jews". Broadly, it may denote any Jew who partakes in secular life and is not extremely religious.[2]

References

  1. ^ Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought. David Biale. Princeton University Press, 2015, p. xii.
  2. ^ Bullivant, Stephen; Ruse, Michael (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Atheism. Oxford University Press, 2017. pp. 320–321.
  3. ^ Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Other Within — The Marranos: Split Identity and Emerging Modernity, Princeton University Press, 2009. pp. 352–358.
  4. ^ Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age, Princeton University Press, 2011. pp. 166–168.
  5. ^ Feiner, Shmuel. The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-Century Europe. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. pp. xi–xiii.
  6. ISBN 0742546071
    .
  7. ^ Meyer, Michael A. (1979). The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany, 1749–1824. Wayne State University Press, pp. 115–123.
  8. Sarna, Jonathan D.
    (2007). The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Secular Judaism. Center for Cultural Judaism.
  9. ^ Litvak, A. at YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. Accessed 2023-12-2.

Further reading

  • Hunter College of the City University of New York
    .
  • ISBN 1-57718-058-5
    .

External links
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jewish_secularism&oldid=1197957501"