20th Century Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs

Secularism

Secularislll Ben Halpern S ecularism, an ambiguous term, may be defined as the tendency to divest religious authority of its control of political, economic, social, and cultural activity. In modern jewish history, the idea of secularism is a recent one, discontinuous with the past. Traditional vocabulary does not have terms distinguishing secular specifically from sacral. The terms kodesh (the holy) and ~ol (the profane) refer to a dichotomy both of whose parts are immediately subject to religious law. The only areas of jewish life in principle outside the exclusive religious jurisdiction of judaism were those upon which a controlling gentile influence impinged: for example, philosophy and science, characteristically referred to as "foreign" or "external wisdom" (~okhmah ~i~onit). And, indeed, the history of jewish secularism (unlike secularism in Occidental Christendom, which is a native growth maturing over the whole extent of European history) is the application to jewish matters of standards carried over from the outside. As a conscious ideology, it is an innovation imported into jewish history well after the onset of the modern era, conventionally dated in the eighteenth century. 864 SECULARISM Israel, where a Jewish state has been created, most clearly exhibits expressions of Jewish secularism, but secularism has also existed in Diaspora Jewry, where it first arose. The political and civil emancipation of the Jews in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created objective pressures that required renunciation of control over many "profane" activities traditionally subject to Jewish religious law. Judaism, understood as a "religion" in the Western (and Christian) sense, was expected to confine itself to the "holy" matters of belief and ritual, expressed publicly in the synagogue and privately in the home by observers. Of course, the proclaimed definition of anything as complex as Judaism is never precisely congruent with reality. During the years of rabbinical domination of Jewish culture and institutions, there was always a division of authority between lay and clerical leaders; and while the rabbis by interpretation might bring some "foreign" sources of law under the aegis of Torah, it was primarily lay influence that channeled essentially secular standards into Jewish life. The same might be said, mutatis mutandis, about the Judaism of postemancipation Jewries. While Judaism was conceived as a "religion" confined to roughly the same functions as the contemporary Church in Western Christendom (relinquishing ev~rything "secular" to the nation-state), each Jewish community in fact exercised plainly secular functions , uniting it in every country with other Jewish communities beyond the borders of the state to which it belonged. This was true, in different ways, for both the Reform Judaism that discarded much of tradition and the Western Neo-Orthodoxy that tried to preserve it intact. It was even more pointedly true of those Jews who dropped any connection with the synagogue and yet remained Jews-in their own eyes, as well as others'. In terms of religious affiliation, postemancipation Jewries exhibited a fourfold division. There were Reform Jews, free to discard traditional rabbinic law; Orthodox Jews, who claimed to preserve it intact: sometimes also "positive-historical" or Conservative Jews, who tried to maintain an intermediate position, and, finally, "unsynagogued" Jews, who neglected or rejected any religious affiliation or practice. Since Orthodox Jews-and for a considerable time, most of the others-strongly rejected intermarriag€across religiOUS lines, Jewish ethnic bonds could have been severed (and might still be) if extreme consequences had been drawn from the religious division that took place. Against this outcome there stood the strong force of the common hardships all suffered together by virtue of their Jewishness: a condition that occasioned more or less the same anti-Jewish prejudice and oppression for all, regardless of their religiOUS differences. This fate shared in common functioned not merely as a barrier against ethnic division in the wake of religiOUS differences. It also served as a secular SECULARISM 865 bond, detached from the strictly religious lines of coherence, which united the Jewish community in positive actions and institutions: in local agencies of social welfare and political intercession and in programs of international action, like those of the Alliance Israelite Universelle or the Jewish Agency for Palestine. Although such associations and activities were objectively secular, Western postemancipation Jewries preferred to see them as works of charity appropriate for a religious community when undertaken on behalf of its coreligionists. In eastern Europe, however, there arose out of despair of fulfilling the hope of emancipation in a foreseeable time...