Secularism
Daniel May
Daniel May is a fellow of the Kogod Research Center at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.
Credit: Kurt Hoffman, Open AI
My family has one story from “the Old Country.” This is how it goes: When at the age of 11 or 12 my great-grandfather was sent from his shtetl in what is now Ukraine to embark on his long journey to the United States, he was given a package wrapped in brown paper. “Don’t open this until you get to America!” he was told. Several weeks later, upon finally seeing the Statue of Liberty from the deck of his ship, he hungrily tore open the gift. Inside was a Hebrew Bible. Disgusted and disappointed, he threw the book overboard and watched it disappear into the dark waters of the harbor.
I am skeptical that this happened in exactly this way. But the facts of the story are less relevant than the fact that this is the story my family has passed down over five generations to capture, with the image of the drowning Book, the world that he left behind and the world that he found. Hello, America; goodbye, Bible and rabbi and synagogue.
It is, to put it mildly, a very American story. And, in its way, a very Jewish one. Heresy is always caught in a paradox, inescapably defined by that which is rejected. In my family, the story serves a similar purpose: ours is a family that broke decisively from a Jewish past; ours is a family inextricably bound to a Jewish past. Like the stories in the drowned Book, this story is also told again, and again, and again.
While perhaps unusual for being so obvious, the tale captures something essential to what has become the dominant strand of contemporary American Jewish identity. According to the 2020 Pew study, only 26% of American Jews believe in the God of the Hebrew Bible, only 15% say that halakhah is essential to “being Jewish,” and only one in five say that religion is “very important” to them (double that number say that it is not too important or not at all important). Yet being Jewish is also either somewhat important or very important to over three-quarters of American Jews. The vast majority of American Jews, it would seem, simultaneously claim and reject the tradition that they declare is essential to their identities. In this, they are—we are—secular Jews.
While many Jews claim the term “secular” today, it originally emerged in the context of Christian religion, and contemporary usage remains shaped by that long shadow. Its Latin root, saeculum, means era or age, and was used in early Christian thought to indicate the period between the first revelation of Jesus’s divinity and Christ’s future return. That is, the saeculum is that unredeemed time between the first and second coming. It is our time. Early Christians used “the secular” to mean the world in contrast to the sacred, the church. In this context, a “secularist” was a priest who served in a congregational church—i.e., in the world—rather than in a monastery.
During and after the Wars of Religion that followed the Reformation throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, “secularization” came to mean the process by which political sovereignty distinguished itself from religious authority. The noun “secularism” identified a political regime in which authority was not grounded in divine right but in something else: “the people,” “the nation,” “the constitution,” the “general welfare,” or “reason.” But it wasn’t until the 19th century that the term “secularist” was first used to describe someone who, as British Prime Minister William Gladstone put it in 1878, “does not of necessity assert anything but the positive and exclusive claims of the purposes, the enjoyments, and the needs, presented to us in the world of sight and experience.” With this formulation, we arrive at “secular” as an identity or disposition opposed to “faith.”
This very cursory attempt at history and definition raises a host of thorny questions that have, over the last century, consumed many historians and philosophers. How are we to make sense of the relationship between contemporary uses of “secular” and the Christian theological framework from which the term initially emerged? If “secular” began as a religious concept, to what extent does it remain indebted to religious frameworks, potentially distinctly Christian ones? If religion isn’t going to provide the moral authority for our politics, what will? And given its sources in Christian thought, how might we conceptualize Jewish secularism?
Several 20th-century philosophers of history described secularism as the guiding thread shaping Western history. The French social theorist Marcel Gauchet offered perhaps the most provocative of these narratives, arguing in the 1970s that the process of secularization began with the rise of monotheism itself; if God was always transcendent, and fundamentally apart and distinct from the world, it was only a matter of time before his departure was total. In his mammoth 2007 A Secular Age, the Canadian Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor described these narratives as variations of a “subtraction thesis,” i.e., they were each describing history as a process of humanity “subtracting” the various myths their ancestors had believed to enable a view of reality unvarnished by the superstitions of religion. To Taylor, such arguments presume what they claim to prove: for “reality” to be taken as that which religion obscures, the religious doctrine must already be assumed to be false. Taylor instead argued that the transformation to the secular is best understood as a transition from a world in which belief in transcendent power was taken as a given to a world in which such belief is one way among many in which meaning can be made.
All of these works take for granted that the story of secularization in the West is ultimately a Christian one. In his 2003 Formations of the Secular, Saudi-born anthropologist Talal Asad makes this explicit, arguing that, in declaring religion a matter of private belief rather than public authority, secularism assumes that “religion” is a matter of personal faith or confession rather than, say, collective practice or communal affiliation. This a distinctively Christian and especially Protestant definition of religion. Asad not only undermines any objective attempt to describe “secularism”; he also suggests that a good deal of what we describe as “secular” may not be quite so purged of Christian claims as is generally assumed.
These various efforts to historicize the secular illuminate an irony at the heart of Jewish secularism. Both despite and because of secularism’s roots in Christian theological distinctions, “secular Judaism” contains a possibility of coherence unavailable to “Christian secularism.” While Christian thought relies on a sharp distinction between the “secularism” of the world and the “faith” offered by the church, this sort of divide is foreign to traditional Judaism, as the framework of Jewish law resists a sharp division between material and transcendent. The “world” in Judaism is not thoroughly profane; it can be made holy.
It is therefore not surprising that, as the revolutions of science and politics in early modern Europe spread across the continent and the world, so many different Jewish secularisms flourished. As David Biale describes in Not in the Heavens (2010), his essential book on the history of Jewish secular thought, these various movements and thinkers represent different attempts to think through the traditional categories of Judaism—God, Torah, and Israel— untethered from any commitment to a transcendent God who revealed his law to his people at Mount Sinai. As much as secular Jewish thinkers reject that fundamental idea, Biale argues, they remain bound to the traditional categories.
This dialectic is already at play in the work that, as much as any, could be considered as inaugurating the Jewish secular tradition, Baruch Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise. There, Spinoza seeks to dispel the idea that biblical miracles are possible or that the prophets heard the commands of a transcendent God through a close reading of the Hebrew Bible. Spinoza was famously excommunicated from the Jewish community of Amsterdam, and from most any traditional perspective, his argument is heretical. But he also insisted that the Bible instructs us in universal truths, and even his rejection of miracles and prophecy is rooted in a radical monotheism: if God is one, then nature and God are one, and therefore anything that acts against nature, including a voice from outside of nature, or a phenomenon that violates natural law, is impossible on both logical and theological grounds. To Spinoza, there was simply nothing other than “the secular.” Yet he nonetheless was described by the German poet Novalis as that “god-intoxicated man.”
Various thinkers have followed Spinoza in refashioning the monotheistic god of Judaism on purely immanent terms: Martin Buber’s account of the divine within interpersonal encounter, for example; Mordecai Kaplan’s “god” of human flourishing; or Richard Rubenstein’s post-Holocaust neo-paganism. But more explicitly secular writers have generally rejected such god-talk, turning instead to history, to text and, above all, to politics.
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Of these efforts, Zionism became the most influential. For the founding figures of political Zionism—Theodore Herzl, Moses Hess, Max Nordau, and Leo Pinsker —Zionism answered two interrelated but distinct “Jewish problems.” The first was the political quandary of how to respond to the persistence of antisemitism under conditions of apparent legal equality; the second was how to be Jewish in light of both its social inescapability and, to their minds, its theological impossibility. Their answer was nationalism, which responded to both challenges with one tidy formula: the Jews were a nation, they always had been, and such a nation need not nor should not look beyond itself for its own identity, survival, or flourishing.
It is not surprising that traditionalists so widely interpreted Zionism as heresy. But the rejection of tradition and theology implicit in all political Zionism generated controversy within the movement as well. In a review of one of Nordau’s dramas, Ahad Ha’am (the pen name of Asher Ginsberg, generally considered the founder of cultural Zionism) took the author to task for having his humiliated Jewish hero challenge an offending German officer to a duel. To Ahad Ha’am, the story captured how political Zionists “betrayed the spirit of the nation in whose name they spoke.… I do not have to explain how much this deed contradicts the fundamental basis of our national morality,” he wrote, “not only the commandments of religion but the very essence of the moral sense which lives in our hearts." To Ahad Ha’am, it was obvious that a Jewish national revival could not simply replicate the frameworks of national pride that governed European political life. But he too struggled to offer a coherent answer to the matter of what precisely provided the Jewish content of a Jewish nationalism. To Ahad Ha’am, an emphasis on religion had deformed Jewish culture by warping what was a national identity into an individualized faith. But this left unanswered the question of what exactly would constitute a revitalized national Jewish identity, after it had been shorn of the Judaism into which it had been deformed.
This dilemma was especially acute within Zionism, given that Zionists so explicitly called upon the tradition that they rejected. But it has in its way troubled most every branch of Jewish secular politics, from Jewish non-territorialists to Bundhists to anarchists to communists to (non-Zionist) socialists. As various Jewish secular thinkers and writers worked to describe what it was that rendered their self-consciously secular political identity “Jewish,” they tended to turn to Jewish text. The trouble was that those texts asserted a God that those movements all denied. The dilemma was softened somewhat by the fact of language: so long as debates over the meaning of a Jewish politics rejecting the authority of God unfolded in Yiddish, Ladino, Hebrew, or any other Jewish dialect or language, the speakers could feel confident that their views were, by definition, Jewish. The trouble only rose to an existential level as those languages came to be spoken by fewer and fewer Jews.
Zionism addressed this problem through institutionalizing Hebrew in daily social and political life, and the flourishing of the Hebrew language is undoubtedly one of its great achievements. But the movement exacerbated other aspects of the tension. However fierce the Zionist’s rejection of religion may have been, mass Jewish return to the land required an appeal to the Hebrew Bible. Without that text, how else to justify a Jewish claim to the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, an area in which, at the turn of the century, Jews constituted less than 5% of the population?[1] Zionists, of course, argued that one could grant authority to the Bible without granting authority to the God of the Bible. But as Leo Strauss and Gershom Scholem argued as early as the 1930s, it is difficult to separate biblical authority from the authority one grants to the God who is, from within the biblical text, that text’s obvious authority. After all, it is God who first promises the land of Israel to the Jewish people. In this respect, political Zionists couldn’t help but appeal to the same source they claimed to reject.
This is perhaps one reason that religious Zionism has become the most powerful political force in contemporary Israeli politics: it offers theoretical cohesion. However one explains the rise of the religious right in Israel, it is clear that as a secular Judaism, political Zionism has proven unable to mount a significant opposition to religious iterations that secularists like Ben-Gurion once assumed would simply wither away under the vicissitudes of history. Among the reasons is that while secular and religious Zionists both tend to appeal to the same claims of ownership over the land, only religious Zionists do so without apology or compromise.
I would argue that secular American Jewish Zionism runs into an additional dilemma. Unlike their Israeli counterparts, American Jews tend to view Israel primarily as a necessary refuge from the violence of antisemitism, tying their Zionism to antisemitism and the Holocaust that is its most horrifying instantiation. Remembering the Holocaust and supporting Israel are often interwoven and for many years they have been enough to sustain even the most avowed secular Jewish identity. (This is arguably one reason these two commitments have been at the very center of Jewish education, organization, and institutional power in the United States for the last half-century.)
The trouble, however, is that American Jews interpret the political mandate of the Holocaust in two different, diametrically opposed directions. The first is that the great political lesson taught by the Nazi regime is that any state that privileges a particular race, religion, or ethnicity is a threat to freedom and equality for all its minorities and especially its Jews. This is the framework that dominates American Jewish orientation towards US politics; it often flies under the banner of “Jewish values.” But a second approach understands the Nazi regime as proving that the only way that Jews might be secure is with a state where Jews and Judaism are privileged. This framework shapes Zionism, both globally and in America. The interpretations are in obvious tension, with one promoting equality for all and the other promoting the privileging of a single group.
For decades, this tension has been softened through appeals to a peace just over the horizon; but as that horizon has grown more distant and even disappeared, greater numbers of American Jews are finding this contradiction harder to ignore. Older American Jews feel the arguments of safety acutely while younger Jews often hear those same arguments as a screen for oppression. The arguments between these views are reshaping the American Jewish political conversation—and, with it, reshaping many familial conversations as well, often painfully.[2] Throughout the American Jewish world, a generational divide is growing into a chasm.
What do these shifts in American Jewish attitudes toward Zionism mean for Jewish secularism? Are we, as some scholars argue, in a post-secularist Jewish era? Certainly, many American Jews are turning to tradition and text and remaking practices of study and celebration in ways that redefine traditional understandings of the transcendent. Whether one calls the study of Talmud through a queer perspective at Svara or a revival of interest in learning Yiddish or niggun circles or recitations of Mourner’s Kaddish at protests against Israel policy “secular” or “religious” is beside the point. Either characterization, and even the dichotomy itself, would likely be rejected by many participants. In my view, such efforts speak to several interrelated dynamics: traditional categories of Jewish observance are unavailable and unappealing to many; practices of late-capitalist life are not particularly conducive to treasuring, preserving, and growing what is most precious in our world; and many of those raised within Jewish life will turn towards the resources within that tradition to provide a counter, respite, and alternative to the atomization and commodification that governs so much of American life.
But is it “secularism,” then, that binds together such disparate endeavors? It is tempting to describe such activities as united by a banner of Jewish culture or peoplehood, but doing so obscures the rifts within the Jewish community that give rise to such efforts. These kinds of practices remain “alternative,” and offer an implicit—and often explicit—rejection of legacy Jewish institutions. Surely, this too is generational, reflective of an urge to remake what one knows in new yet recognizable ways, a tendency by no means unique to this moment. But I would argue there is something deeper at work, as the frameworks provided by the bonds of American Jewish identity over the last half-century—Zionism on one hand, American liberal exceptionalism on the other—are under increasing strain.
Such efforts might, ironically and counterintuitively, take as their guiding light a very non-secular commandment: thou shall have no gods above me. The negative framing of the law offers an intriguing possibility: you are free not to believe, so long as you don’t worship something else as your god? What would a Jewishness look like that rejected the gods of race, or nation, or even secularism? It would look, I think, like a Jewishness that embraces a radical skepticism, that refuses to imagine it has settled on the answers, that welcomes transformation, that rejects stasis, that is never wholly comfortable with any given habit of practice or thought. It would try to clarify the central questions of our time, without presuming in advance to know the answers, and it would seek to shape communities and practices in response to those challenges. It would be both radical and traditional. It would, in short, embrace the dilemmas that so much Jewish secularism, and Jewish politics, have tried to evade.
Such a Jewishness may be unsatisfying, fragile, and precarious. It may, for that reason, be uncomfortable to imagine. But it asks us as human agents to take responsibility for ourselves, which is ultimately the great claim, and promise, and hope, of secularism.
Endnotes
[1] Justin McCarthy, The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
[2] According to a 2023 survey by the Brookings Institution, 38% of American Jews under the age of 40 agree that Israel is an apartheid state, while only 13% of American Jews over 64 do. See Jordan Muchnick and Elaine Kamarck, “The generation gap in opinions toward Israel,” Brookings, November 9, 2023.
