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This introductory chapter considers why the hallmark of modern Jewish identity is its resistance to—and, at the same time, obsession with—definition. Like battles over national identity in the modern state, clashes over the nature and limits of Jewishness have frequently taken the shape of controversies over the status—and stature—of marginal Jews past and present. The Jewish rehabilitation of historical heretics and apostates with a vexed relationship to Judaism has become so much a part of contemporary discourse that it is difficult to imagine secular Jewish culture without it. Yet this tendency has a beginning as well as a template in modern Jewish history, which the chapter introduces in the figure of Baruch (or Benedictus) Spinoza (1632–1677)—“the first great culture-hero of modern secular Jews,” and still the most oft-mentioned candidate for the title of first modern secular Jew.

This chapter studies the long historiographic tradition in search of a definition of the Haskalah. It suggests reducing the historical parameters of the Jewish Enlightenment so that it can be recognized as a trend in which modernizing intellectuals aspired to transform Jewish society. Despite the obvious diversity and dispersion of the Haskalah, and the difficulty in defining it precisely, the chapter enumerates a number of essential criteria, elaborating on the self-consciousness of the maskilim and paying special attention to their militant rhetoric and awareness of belonging to an avant-garde, redemptive, and revolutionary movement. It also sketches a portrait of the typical maskil, surveys the history of the movement and its various centres, and elucidates the dualistic nature of its ideology, explaining its links to the processes of Jewish modernization and secularization. Ultimately, the Haskalah was the intellectual option for modernization that triggered the Jewish Kulturkampf which, still alive today — especially in Israel — separates modernists and anti-modernists, Orthodox and secular Jews.

This chapter reminds that citizens do not come to the culture wars as abstract Americans but as carriers of distinctive religious and ethnic traditions; the split between secular modernist Jews and their Orthodox brethren, even as it participates in the broader dynamic of cultural contention, has its own distinctive accents. The chapter notes that at a time of multicultural ferment, when gays, blacks, Latinos, women, fundamentalist Christians, and just about everybody else ebulliently promotes their own identities and interests in public, Jews are loathe to give credence to positions based on the particularistic traditions of Judaism. It observes that much of the public policy agenda of the organized Jewish community is still rooted in a post-World War II conception of American civil religion that soft-pedals particularism. It recommends that this approach warrants rethinking because American society has changed in recent decades and many minority groups now unabashedly put forward their own demands.

This chapter explores the notion of a purely secular version of Jewish identity. It begins by considering the Posen Foundation's approach that “views a cultural perception of Judaism as one of several possibilities available to the modern secular Jew, along with outlooks such as national or ethnic perceptions.” It then examines the ways in which the identification of Jews as Jews is tied up with reference to traditional Jewish religious beliefs and practice. It also discusses problems associated with the very notion of a Jewish State, problems that would seem to remain even for the most secular of versions of its Jewish identity. Finally, it evaluates the claim that Israel is a democracy and correlates it with the issue of citizenship given the government's treatment of its non-Jewish citizens.

This chapter narrates how secular Jews in Europe, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, came to associate rabbinic literature with narrow-minded orthodoxy. Secular Zionists, in particular, wished to disassociate themselves from the shtetl—the life of traditional Jews in eastern Europe. The hand that severed the Jewish tree of knowledge left a void between the biblical period and contemporary era. The reason for this forgoing of old writings and holding on to the Bible alone can be traced to the Enlightenment, when the Jews aspired to establish their culture on the component it shared with the surrounding Christian society, to renounce the old image of the Jew, the world of the heder and the yeshiva, and to erect in its place a new Jew who jumped from the biblical period to the modern day.

This chapter focuses on inclusivism. Inclusivism is a classic strategy of tradition, embodying an Orthodox view of Jewish unity. It uses halakhic strategies to include within the covenantal community those whose beliefs and practices would, if taken at their face value, place them outside. It is an extraordinarily powerful device, capable of neutralizing the schismatic impact of almost any Jewish ideology at odds with tradition. Its method, considered as a formal halakhic device, is to isolate the liberal or secular Jew from his beliefs. The beliefs remain heretical but those who believe them are not heretics, for they do not ultimately or culpably believe them. Liberal and secular Jews remain Jews, even though neither liberal nor secular Judaism is Judaism. The chapter then looks at the relationship between inclusivism and post-Holocaust theologies.

The place of Yiddish in Jewish religiosity is complex, playing a distinct but integral role in the internal bilingualism of traditional Ashkenazi worship and devotional scholarship. Yiddish became an important vehicle of what might be termed “popular religion” in the early modern period in the form of instructional manuals, supplementary liturgy, and translations of sacred texts. The language has been imbued with a distinct spiritual significance by Hasidim, who currently make the most extensive use of Yiddish in religious life. Conversely, Yiddish has been an important language for ardently secular Jews, for some of whom the language has replaced religious observance as their defining rubric of Jewishness.