Secular Jewish culture: Encyclopedia II - Secular Jewish culture - How secular Jewish culture came to be

Secular Jewish culture - How secular Jewish culture came to be

Medieval Jewish communities in Eastern Europe developed distinct cultural traits over the centuries, but beginning with the Enlightenment (and its echo within Judaism in the Haskalah movement), many Yiddish-speaking Jews in Eastern Europe saw themselves as forming an ethnic or national group whose identity did not depend on religion. Constanin Măciucă writes of "a differentiated but not isolated Jewish spirit" permeating the culture of Yiddish-speaking Jews. This was only intensified as the rise of Romanticism increased the sense of national identity across Europe generally. Thus, for example, Bund members — that is, members of the General Jewish Labor Union in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — were generally non-religious, and one of the historical leaders of the Bund was the child of converts to Christianity, though not a practising or believing Christian himself.

Defining secular culture among those who practice Judaism is difficult, however, because the entire culture is entwined with religious traditions. (This is particularly true of Orthodox Judaism.) Gary Tobin, head of the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, said of traditional Jewish culture: "The dichotomy between religion and culture doesn’t really exist. Every religious attribute is filled with culture; every cultural act filled with religiosity. Synagogues themselves are great centers of Jewish culture. After all, what is life really about? Food, relationships, enrichment hellip; So is Jewish life. So many of our traditions inherently contain aspects of culture. Look at the Passover Seder—it’s essentially great theater. Jewish education and religiosity bereft of culture is not as interesting." [1]

In the early 19th century, the Ashkenazi Jews were mainly in Europe, especially Eastern Europe; the Sephardi Jews were largely, though not exclusively, in the Arab world; and other populations of Jews were scattered in such places as Ethiopia the Caucasus, and India. (See Jewish ethnic divisions.) Many of these populations were cut off in some degree from the surrounding cultures by ghettoization, by the Muslim laws of dhimma, etc., although Jewish Emancipation was under way in Central and Western Europe. The last two brought not emancipation but a continuation of pogroms and the demographic disaster of The Holocaust, and (since the rise of Israel an unprecedented anti-Semitism in the Arab world). Partly as a result, the world's Jews have undergone a remarkable migration and in-gathering: not only the aliyah to Israel and the creaton of the first Jewish state since ancient times, but also a concentration of some 1,750,000 Jews in the New York metropolitan area and communities in the hundreds of thousands in other American cities. The Jews have also, on average, become a more secular people. Even within Orthodox Judaism, Modern Orthodox Judaism arose as a synthesis between traditional Judaism and secular culture.

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