Three Basic Models of Secular Jewish Culture

Introduction

The encyclopedia, New Jewish Time: Jewish Culture in a Secular Age¹ is the highlight of the intensive, comprehensive, and relentless pre-occupation of contemporary secular Jewish culture with defining itself. This encyclopedia endeavors to present a panoramic documentation of the individuals, the movements, the works, and the institutions that left their mark on this culture in the past two hundred years.

This project not only documents the past but also reflects the present and delineates the future horizons of secular Jewish culture from the viewpoint of the project's participants. The educational goal is presented in the foreword by Yair Tsaban who initiated this project:

It is incumbent upon a public that defines itself as secular to learn the meaning of secularity and how the processes of modernization and secularization occurred in our people and in other peoples.²

Be that what it may, Secular Jewish cultural education, must first require a thorough examination of the term "secular Jewish culture", which is elucidated in the introductory essay by the chief editor Yirmiyahu Yovel.

I argue that the term "secular Jewish culture" cannot be reduced to a single essence, for it extends the category of family and in a family nothing is discernible beyond a complicated web of interwoven similarities amounting to what Wittgenstein termed "a family resemblance". As in any large family, secular Jewish culture has branches corresponding to clusters of attributes, or shared patterns.

Defining Secular Jewish Culture

Secular Jewish culture is one of the offshoots of the secularization of Western culture in the modern era. However, this offshoot is unique and complex not only due to the exceptional status of Jews in Western culture, but also for the ancient traditional dominance of the Jewish religion over Jewish identity.

The term "secularization", in its narrow sense as a terminus technicus, denotes the process of transferring some particular thing from the sacred sphere to the non-sacred sphere, that of the world (the saeculum). Beyond the narrow legal-ecclesiastical sense, this term is used to denote

a process of freeing politics and culture from the guardianship of the medieval Catholic Church and a process whereby values, norms, types of authority, behavior and knowledge become independent of those sanctified by the medieval Church and of the sphere of faith and transcendence . . . this term signifies the core essence of modernity as the Church's and the Catholic faith's hegemony over all aspects of society characterized the core essence of medieval times.³

The terms "Jewish culture" and its modern offspring "secular Jewish culture" resist any rigid formal definition that might bind them within restrictive necessary and sufficient conditions. We must make do with what Wittgenstein termed a "family resemblance" between "a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing."⁴ Even if we were to accept Yovel's broader and more generous definition of a Jew, "A personal preoccupation with the question of Jewishness is a natural and sufficient indication that one is Jewish" (I. xvii) and further accept his general definition of culture as denoting "all that human beings jointly create, and that, in turn, contributes to their interpretation of the world and to their inter-relationships".⁵ We would not then be able to argue that every cultural creation created by Jews (whether religious or secular, according to one definition or another) is part of that culture, whatever the precise content of that culture.

No one would argue that Einstein's theory of relativity is part of (even secular) Jewish culture, whereas all would agree that Brenner's stories and essays are part of that culture, while opinions may differ on Marx's writings and philosophy.⁶ Wagner's claim that Mendelssohn's music is Jewish is considered anti-Semitic; the assertion that Klezmer music is Jewish is often presented as factual (although it may not necessarily be true or entirely so), and Adorno's description of Mahler's music as having a Jewish quality is controversial.⁷ Although, in matters of "family resemblance" it is far easier to identify than to define, even identification is far from simple.

By adopting...