Jewish culture

Jewish culture is the culture of the Jewish people from the formation of the Jewish nation in ancient Israel through life in the diaspora and the modern state of Israel. Judaism guides its adherents in both practice and belief, so that it has been called not only a religion, but an orthopraxy. Not all individuals or all cultural phenomena can be classified as either 'secular' or 'religious', a distinction native to Enlightenment thinking. Jewish culture in its etymological meaning retains linkage to the Jewish people's land of origin, the people named for the Kingdom of Judah, study of Jewish texts, practice of community charity, and Jewish history. The term 'secular Jewish culture' therefore refers to many aspects, including: Religion and World View, Literature, Media, and Cinema, Art and Architecture, Cuisine and Traditional Dress, attitudes to Gender, Marriage, and Family, Social Customs and Lifestyles, Music and Dance. 'Secular Judaism,' is a distinct phenomenon related to Jewish secularization - a historical process of divesting all of these elements of culture from their religious beliefs and practices. Secular Judaism, derived from the philosophy of Moses Mendelssohn, arose out of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, which was itself driven by the values of the Enlightenment. In recent years, the academic field of study has encompassed Jewish Studies, History, Literature, Sociology, and Linguistics. Historian David Biale has traced the roots of Jewish secularism back to the pre-modern era. He, and other scholars highlight the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who was dubbed 'the renegade Jew who gave us modernity' by scholar and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein in an intellectual biography of him. Today, the subject of Jewish secularization is taught, and researched, at many North American and Israeli universities, including Harvard, Tel Aviv University, UCLA, Temple University and City University of New York which have significant Jewish alumni. Additionally, many schools include the academic study of Judaism and Jewish culture in their curricula. Throughout history, in eras and places as diverse as the ancient Hellenic world, in Europe before and after the Age of Enlightenment, in Al-Andalus, North Africa and the Middle East, in India and China, and in the contemporary United States and Israel, Jewish communities have seen the development of cultural phenomena that are characteristically Jewish without being at all specifically religious. Some factors in this come from within Judaism, others from the interaction of Jews with host populations in the diaspora, and others from the inner social and cultural dynamics of the community, as opposed to religion itself. This phenomenon has led to considerably different variations of Jewish culture unique to their own communities. There has not been a political unity of Jewish society since the united monarchy. Since then Israelite populations were always geographically dispersed (see Jewish diaspora), so that by the 19th century the Ashkenazi Jews were mainly in Eastern and Central Europe; the Sephardi Jews were largely spread among various communities in the Mediterranean region; Mizrahi Jews were primarily spread throughout Western Asia; and other populations of Jews were in Central Asia, Ethiopia, the Caucasus, and India. (See Jewish ethnic divisions.) Although there was a high degree of communication and traffic between these communities — many Sephardic exiles blended into the Ashkenazi communities in Central Europe following the Spanish Inquisition; many Ashkenazim migrated to the Ottoman Empire, giving rise to the characteristic Syrian-Jewish family name 'Ashkenazi'; Iraqi-Jewish traders formed a distinct Jewish community in India; many of these populations were cut off to some degree from the surrounding cultures by ghettoization, by Muslim laws of dhimma, and traditional discouragement of contact with polytheistic populations. Medieval Jewish communities in Eastern Europe continued to display distinct cultural traits over the centuries. Despite the universalist leanings of the Enlightenment (and its echo within Judaism in the Haskalah movement), many Yiddish-speaking Jews in Eastern Europe continued to see themselves as forming a distinct national group — ' 'am yehudi', from the Biblical Hebrew — but, adapting this idea to Enlightenment values, they assimilated the concept as that of an ethnic group whose identity did not depend on religion, which under Enlightenment thinking fell under a separate category. Constantin 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 amplified the sense of national identity across Europe generally. Thus, for example, members of the General Jewish Labour Bund 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 practicing or believing Christian himself.