David Biale is Emanuel Ringelblum Distinguished Professor of Jewish History and Chair of the Department of History at the University of California, Davis. His books have won the National Jewish Book Award three times and he has been awarded fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Lady Davis Foundation. Most recently, he won the UC Davis Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Scholarly Achievement. He is currently the Project Director of an international team writing a History of Hasidism.
The following exchange will focus on Professor Biale’s book Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought, which was recently released on paperback by Princeton University Press.
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Dear Professor Biale,
In the introduction to your book you write the following:
The majority of Jews in the world today are, in some sense, secular. They either doubt the existence of God or consider the question superfluous. They believe in the separation of religion from the state. Even Orthodox Jews outside of the State of Israel would probably agree with Moses Mendelssohn that church and state should be separated: religious in private, they are secular in public. And most Jews now define their identities in historical and/or cultural terms. But in a nonideological age, “secular” has largely ceased to be a fighting word and, for that reason, it may not be the first word most Jews choose to identify themselves. In one sense, this means that the ideologues of Jewish secularism won their battle, but in another sense, they did not, since the secular culture that they had in mind was one intentionally chosen.
The secular Jewish thinkers you focus on in your book are largely figures who had to intentionally choose and fight for their secularist beliefs because tradition and orthodoxy were all around them. What could today’s secular Jews in a America or in Israel, who are usually secular by default, learn from the counter-tradition your book describes? Does it present a substantive philosophical tradition that might appeal to them, or is it more a historical narrative about time-specific struggles they no longer have to face?
Yours,
Shmuel.
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Dear Shmuel,
A hundred years ago – a time I refer to as the “secular moment” in Jewish history –ideologically secular movements competed on the Jewish street: various brands of secular Zionism (leftwing, further leftwing and even rightwing), Bundism, Communism, territorialism and autonomism, not to speak of outright assimilationism. This was a time when the majority of Jews were still religiously traditional, but tradition was under attack, not only from these ideologies but also from the powerful forces of secular modernity. In interwar Poland, for example, Hasidism, the most dynamic form of traditionalism in the modern world, was in decline with its sons and daughters – including those of the rebbes themselves – defecting to secular movements. And the Holocaust seemingly completed this process by dealing a death blow to the heartland of religious Judaism, while Zionism registered the greatest victory for secularism by establishing an anti-theocratic Jewish state.
But the victory of secularism has proven to be temporary and not only for Judaism. It is no secret that in the “post-secular” world, fundamentalist forms of Islam, Christianity and Judaism have enjoyed a remarkable renaissance. Secular Zionism as a dynamic ideology seems spent as various types of Orthodoxy – national religious, haredi and various permutations of these groups – are ascending. The success of the settlement movement, largely led by the religious, has reshaped the image of Zionism. So too has the emergence of traditionalist Mizrahi religion.
In America, where nearly half of all Jews call themselves secular and a quarter of whom say they do not believe in God, the secular movements from early in the twentieth century have also largely disappeared. Secularism as an ideology is at best a vestige of what it was a century ago. Moreover, the demography appears to favour the Orthodox: while recent surveys show that Orthodox Jews are still only around 10% of the Jewish population in the United States, 25% of the younger generation is Orthodox. It might appear as if the future belongs to them, just as newly confident Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox in Israel believe themselves to be the future Israeli state in-the-making.
So, do the ideologies of Jewish secularism from the secular moment in Jewish histories have anything to say today? I believe they do. First, reports of the death of secular Jewish culture are, at the very least, premature. While the political system in Israel may be increasingly in the thrall of the religious, secular Hebrew culture is alive and kicking. The city of Tel Aviv, although perhaps a bubble relative to the rest of the country, represents the victory of secularism in the Israeli context. I am particularly struck by the enormous success of secular yeshivot in connecting secular Israelis with the Jewish textual tradition and, in the process, challenging the Orthodox on their own turf. To take possession of the Jewish library, that is, to argue that it belongs to all Jews, seems to me exactly the right way to create a new secular Jewish culture.
Similar trends can be found in North America, although perhaps not with the same intensity as in Israel. Mechon Hadar in New York City is an example of a place where Jews of different religious interests – or none at all – can study Jewish texts. The explosive growth of Jewish Studies at American universities, although it has perhaps slowed in recent years, is another non-religious site where secular Jews – as well as non-Jews – can encounter the Jewish textual tradition. And the sociological studies of younger Jews suggest that even among the most secular, assimilated and intermarried, a desire to connect non-traditionally with the Jewish tradition demonstrates that the future does not belong only to the Orthodox.
My book makes an argument that is not only descriptive but could also be understood as prescriptive: that is, as a possible blueprint for a new ideology of Jewish secularism. This blueprint is based on the idea that for secularism to be Jewish, it needs to be grounded in an interpretation of Jewish texts. I argue that secular Jewish thinkers from Baruch Spinoza to David Ben-Gurion significantly revised the three traditional categories of the Jewish religion: God, Torah and Israel. Their secular definition of these categories — God as nature, the Torah as an historical book and Israel as a secular nation — remain as relevant today in a “post-secular” age.
Jewish secularism possesses a deep intellectual tradition of its own that needs to become known today to those determined to carve out a Jewish identity independent of religion. But I argue that this tradition is not detached from the three-thousand-year-old library of Judaism but is rather a dialectical product of it. And, therefore, to construct a secular ideology for today requires deep immersion in Jewish texts, which, in my view, contain not only the sources of the Jewish religion but also the sources of Jewish secularism.
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