The Characteristics of Jewish Culture in Israel as Expressed by its Secularisation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12775/TiCz.2014.038Keywords
Jews, Jewish culture, secularization, IsraelAbstract
Throughout millennia, Jewish culture was imbued with an inherent religious component, which determined its exceptional nature and specificity. Hence one may venture to call it a Judaist culture. However, with the onset of the Jewish renaissance (the Haskalah) and in the wake of assimilation processes there appeared elements, which disrupted historical continuity, establishing new criteria of Jewish identity. Judaism understood as religion ceased to be a necessary attribute of Jewishness. Zionism, which laid the foundation of the Israeli state, strove by default to forge a “new man”, who was to be determined by secular culture. Its fundamental premises did not draw upon the Biblical Israel or the phenomenon of the Diaspora. On the contrary, the past and its burdens were to be abandoned, as Zionism aspired to create a future based on new paradigms. Yet not all postulates of Zionism came true. Contemporary Israel became both a territory where external foe is fought (the Arab world) and an arena where internal struggle for the nature of the state is taking place. The paper therefore attempts to draw a characterization of Israeli culture and demonstrate the manifestations of secularization to which traditional Jewish culture has been subject in the Jewish state. This is because one is confronted with the fundamental question, namely whether and in what sense Israeli culture is Jewish in nature?
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
CC BY ND 4.0. The Creator/Contributor is the Licensor, who grants the Licensee a non-exclusive license to use the Work on the fields indicated in the License Agreement.
- The Licensor grants the Licensee a non-exclusive license to use the Work/related rights item specified in § 1 within the following fields: a) recording of Work/related rights item; b) reproduction (multiplication) of Work/related rights item in print and digital technology (e-book, audiobook); c) placing the copies of the multiplied Work/related rights item on the market; d) entering the Work/related rights item to computer memory; e) distribution of the work in electronic version in the open access form on the basis of Creative Commons license (CC BY-ND 3.0) via the digital platform of the Nicolaus Copernicus University Press and file repository of the Nicolaus Copernicus University.
- Usage of the recorded Work by the Licensee within the above fields is not restricted by time, numbers or territory.
- The Licensor grants the license for the Work/related rights item to the Licensee free of charge and for an unspecified period of time.
FULL TEXT License Agreement
Stats
Number of views and downloads: 1468
Number of citations: 0