Introduction Rethinking Jews and Secularism Ari Joskowicz and Ethan Katz For much of the twentieth century, most secular and religious thinkers believed that they were living in an age of steady secularization. Many perceived the Enlightenment and Europe as the interlinked chronological and geographical focal points that had given birth to secularization before it began its inevitable march across space and time. Depending on their religious outlooks, they saw their own era as ushering in either a "Golden Age" of secularism or a dark period of godless decadence. It was only in the closing decades of the twentieth century--when scholars and pundits began to speak of the global resurgence of religion--that secularism became the center of heated discussions. Today, the secular is no longer considered the norm; it has become something to be explained and studied. This broader shift has also occurred among Jews. After the Second World War, Judaism as a religion appeared to be in decline. A major portion of Eastern European Orthodoxy had been annihilated in the Holocaust, a largely secularist brand of left-wing Zionism dominated the political scene among Jews in Palestine (and, later, Israel), while religious observance among Jewish communities in the Americas began to wane.

During the 1960s, traditional Jewish settings--much like non-Jewish religious milieus in the United States and Europe--appeared to be fragmenting. Although many viewed Judaism as a resilient and meaningful force in their lives, few would have defined it as a serious challenge to the secularism of the existing political order. All of this has now changed profoundly. A number of key developments have upended assumptions about the triumph of secularism in Jewish life. These include the strengthening of Orthodox movements and institutions in Israel and the United States; the meteoric rise of the Chabad Lubavitch movement; the growth and radicalization of Religious Zionism since 1967; the increased presence of religious themes in Zionist discourse (emblematized and accelerated by the 1977 rise to power of the Likud Party in Israel); and the emergence of a series of new Jewish movements for spiritual renewal. Liberal Jewish commentators in turn responded by expressing their strong objection to many of these developments, which they considered profoundly disruptive to the progressive, secular consensus they sought to achieve. From attempts to create a new type of "secular Judaism" in the United States to clashes around gender-segregated buses in Israel, we are now witnessing the revival of culture wars that recall similar conflicts fought over the preceding three centuries. This book probes how these new contestations of secularism force us to rethink a host of questions about Jews and the evolution of Judaism in modern times.

Such an undertaking involves bringing together two areas of research that have until recently remained isolated from one another--Jewish studies and the study of secularism and secularization. A Missed Encounter Until recently Jewish studies scholars engaged only rarely with the longstanding interdisciplinary conversation about secularism and secularization. By the same token, Jews received scant attention in the extensive scholarship on secularism in the broader humanities and social sciences. This missed encounter is unfortunate for many reasons. First, many of the key dichotomies underpinning secularist discourse evolved from the oppositions that Christian thinkers historically constructed to juxtapose Christianity and Judaism. Indeed, the idea that a forward-looking Christianity had superseded an archaic Judaism established patterns of thinking about time and meaning in history that shaped notions of progress among religious, non-religious, and anti-religious thinkers alike. Modern conceptions of secularization and its equation with human advancement thus emerged from what Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin and Carlo Ginzburg term the "Christian ambivalence toward the Jews." In assessing the role of Christian understandings of history for secular narratives of progress, Raz-Krakotzkin and others have contended that as the former evolved into the latter, Judaism retained the role of a foil.

As the major non-Christian minority in Western and Central Europe until well into the twentieth century, Jews remained crucial symbolic others who helped to define secularist interpretations of the world, including secularization theory. A revealing passage from one of the seminal texts of secularization theory illustrates the persistent symbolism of Judaism as a primitive and non-productive religion. In Max Weber''s lecture "On Science as a Vocation," where he coined the phrase "the disenchantment of the world" to describe what he saw as the gradual withdrawal of magical thinking from various spheres of life, he assigned the Jews an emblematic place in this story. At the end of his text, Weber declares: "Integrity . compels us to state that for the many who today tarry for new prophets and saviors, the situation is the same as that which resounds in the beautiful Edomite watchman''s song of the period of exile [and] which has been included among Isaiah''s oracles." He then cites an enigmatic passage from the Book of Isaiah, chapter 21, wherein the night signifies the darkness before the expected redemption: "A call comes to me from Seir: ''Watchman, what of the night?'' . The watchman replied, ''Morning came and so did night. If you would inquire, inquire.

Come back again.''" Weber concludes: "The people to whom this was said has enquired and tarried for more than two millennia, and we are shaken when we realize its fate. From this we want to draw the lesson that nothing is gained by yearning and tarrying alone, and we shall act differently." Thus, at the close of this foundational analysis of secularization, Weber presents Jews as the foil for thinking about the "disenchantment of the world." In his depiction, Jews remained entombed in their own enchantment and tied to an ancient set of beliefs out of step with science and reason. He thus implies that both their passivity and otherworldly religiosity constitute the very source of the suffering and persecution they have experienced over the centuries. Weber''s words exemplify how frequently, in discussions of the secular, Jews assume roles that are similar to those they have long played in Christian theology. Even though Catholic and Protestant thought have historically treated Jews differently, in both cases they were important primarily as symbolic actors rather than as an evolving ethnoreligious community.

Furthermore, secularist critiques of tradition were often inextricably linked to widespread prejudices against Jews as primitive, obstinate, and incapable of assimilation to European citizenship and values. Reconsidering secularization and secularism thus requires a reconsideration of the position of the Jews therein. A second set of factors that calls out for a more direct encounter between Jewish and secularism studies lies in the unique evolution of Jewish history, thought, and literature. Having lived for millennia in settings where another faith served as the official state religion, Jews have long had to negotiate between their own laws and practices and those of non-Jewish sovereigns and societies. As early as the Hellenistic period and the Babylonian exile, Jews began to ask how to assign value to non-Jewish realms of knowledge that they considered non-sacred, or to navigate professional and social relationships that often enticed them to venture outside of the Jewish community. Several premodern Jewish responses to the challenges posed to Jewish law, or Halakhah , by life in a non-Jewish state speak to issues that Jews continue to wrestle with today. To take three notable examples: in order to minimize tensions between the observance of Halakhah and respect for the rules of the sovereign government of the land in which they resided, already in late antiquity Jews developed the principle of dina de-malkhuta dina (the law of the land is the law); similarly, the idea that it is necessary both to learn Torah and Talmud and to engage with the wisdom of non-Jews emerged in response to Jews'' attempts to balance the study of Jewish and non-religious subjects, first in the Talmud and then more systematically in the medieval writings of Maimonides; finally, the invocation of the command of darkhei shalom , pursuing paths of peace, beginning in the Middle Ages enabled a number of Jewish legal leniencies to govern Jews'' relations with their gentile neighbors. As the challenges to traditional Judaism intensified in the era of emancipation, Jewish encounters with the secular allowed a variety of Jewish thinkers and nascent movements to reinforce, rethink, and contest such longstanding principles.

The nineteenth-century European Jewish experience offers a particularly useful case study of the interplay between secularism and Judaism. At the core of debates about secularism are definitions of religion as well as questions such as these: Where and how should religion be practiced? What is its place in politics and in the formation of proper citizens? How do religious, ethnic, national, and racial identities overlap or diverge? Should certain spheres be reserved for the sacred or excluded from it? All these questions became central to Jews in the era of emancipation, as they sought to remake themselves according to new standards of citizenship. In the process, they had to define the role and reach of Jewish law while also proving their loyalty as Jews and citizens of both secular and not-so-secular nations. Modern European Jews also had to position themselves in a matrix of new relationships, whether as one confession among others or as a national group in need of cultural autonomy or minor.