Jewish culture

The term Jewish culture refers to a diverse range interrelated associated phenomena; on the one hand the secular culture of the Jewish communities, on the other hand the cultural contribution of certain secular Jews, but also the culture of those religious Jews who have importance in the cultural field, but are usually not explicitly associated with religion.

Judaism is for his followers decisively both in practice and in the faith and is considered not only as a religion but as it as a " lifestyle ". This makes it difficult to make a simple distinction between Judaism and Jewish culture. In addition, not all individuals or all cultural phenomena can be easily as either " secular " or "religious" classify.

Since the beginning of Jewish history, cultural phenomena have developed that have certain characteristic Jewish traits without regard themselves as particularly religious. Some of these features come directly from Judaism, others the various relations of the Jews to their environment, others the social and cultural dynamics of the Jewish community, in dealing with the religion itself

Origins of Jewish Culture

A Jewish culture as a coherent whole has not given it at least 2,000 years. The Jews lived until the 19th century in the diaspora scattered, mainly in Europe, the Ashkenazim; spread the Sephardim widely among the countries of North Africa, Turkey, as well as smaller communities of other regions and of different sizes, while the Mizrahi were distributed mainly in the Arab world; other Jewish groups, there was in Ethiopia, the Caucasus ( Mountain Jews ) or in India. Many of these people have been ghettoized in some degree from the surrounding cultures. From the end of the Middle Ages until the Holocaust, the vast majority of the Jewish population of the world of Ashkenazi descent.

The Eastern European Jewish communities of the Middle Ages developed over the centuries, distinct cultural characteristics, and with the onset of Education ( along with their Jewish Echo, the Haskalah ), understood the Yiddish - speaking Jews of Eastern Europe even as forming a separate ethnic or national group whose identity not necessarily based on religion. Constantin Maciuca calls this " a distinctive but not insulating Jewish spirit" that permeates the culture of Yiddish-speaking Jews. This was reinforced by the rise of Romanticism and the general growth of a national consciousness in European countries only. So, for example, were the members of the Federal - (General Jewish Labour Union ) from the late 19th to early 20th century - avowedly non-religious or anti-religious. The Haskalah united the Jewish emancipation movement in Central and Western Europe, so as to pave the Jews access to secular society. At the same time caused pogroms in Eastern Europe a wave of emigration, largely in the U.S., where there were between 1880 and 1920 two million Jewish immigrants. In the 1940s, the Holocaust destroyed the greater part of European Jewry, and the expulsion of Jews from Arab and Islamic countries, resulted in association with the emergence of Israel another geographical shift.

It is complicated to define, in the religiously observant Jews, the secular culture, because their whole culture is steeped as it were of religious traditions. (. This is especially true for Orthodox Judaism ) Gary Tobin, head of the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, spoke about the traditional Jewish culture:

There is no real opposition between religion and culture. Every religious feature appears filled with culture; every cultural act with religiosity. The synagogue itself is a center of Jewish culture. What makes life finally really? Food, relationships, wealth; that's Jewish life. So many of our traditions include cultural aspects in themselves. See Passover ( Seder ): it is essentially great theater. Deprived of one Jewish education and religiosity of the culture, it is uninteresting.

Yaakov Malkin, Professor of Aesthetics and Rhetoric at Tel Aviv University founder and academic director of the Meitar College of Judaism as Culture in Jerusalem notes:

Today, many secular Jews commit to mundane way Jewish cultural events, the Jewish holidays as historical and nature-based festivals, with new content and form, or the striking events of the circle of life such as birth, Bat / Bar Mitzvah, marriage and death. They come together to study topics of Jewish culture and its relationship to other cultures, in havurot, cultural associations and secular synagogues, and participate in public and political life similar to the erstwhile secular Jewish movements, such as the former movement for the freedom of Soviet Jews or the movements against the pogroms, discrimination and religious compulsion. The Jewish secular humanistic education characterizes general moral values ​​both by classical Jewish and through the world literature as well as through the pursuit of social change, to the ideal of justice and charity.

Languages

Literature and theater -related expressions of secular Jewish culture can both occur in the specifically Jewish languages ​​such as Hebrew, Yiddish or Ladino, as well as in the language of the surrounding cultures such as English, Russian or German. The secular Yiddish literature and the theater experienced its decline in the 19th century, their rise and mid-20th century. The revival of Hebrew on its liturgical use is also a special phenomenon of the early 20th century, which is closely associated with Zionism. In general, the regional situation determines whether a Jewish community uses a Jewish or non-Jewish language. Thus, the language of the Jews in the Polish shtetl was like the Lower East Side of New York ( early 20th century ) Yiddish, while the assimilated Jews of Germany in the 19th century or speak currently in the U.S. today are generally German and English.