Haifa University

The program, "Judaism as Culture," aims at presenting the historical process of Jewish secularization as a formative element in the emergence of Jewish society in the 19th and the 20th centuries, and to highlight the existence of modern Jewish cultural and secular ways of life in a spectrum of Jewish communities and individual trajectories. We expect the program to challenge common concepts of Israeli society as regards secular Judaism as well as Jewish orthodoxy, and thereby to examine and alter some of the fundamental concepts of the average Israeli student touching on the essence and the goals of the present-day Israeli society. These intellectual goals are to be reached by way of critical and deep-delving academic study that will inspire our students to make their own contribution to the development of a new understanding of modern Jewish and Jewish-Israeli identity.


Introduction to Secular Jewish Culture and Thought

The course will trace the development of Jewish secularization (ideas, culture and practices), focusing on the formation of secular Jewish identity in Europe, and on the processes that made this development possible. Hence special attention will be given to the influence of European political and intellectual on Jewish secularization and modernization, and to the various components of Jewish secularization (philosophical, ideological, cultural, artistic and literary manifestations).

This is the focal course of the new program. In order to attain a student body that would be as broad and diverse as possible, the course will offer a different reach and structure in each of the two semesters.


The Modernization and Secularization of the Jewish Society

The course will look at the decline of the Jewish traditional religious order and the political, economic, social and intellectual causes of the modernization and secularization processes of Jewish society in Western and Central Europe throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.


Between Zionism and Anti-Semitism

The course will examine the process of secularization, acculturation and emancipation, considering the ways in which the Jewish societies in Western, Central and Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries accepted and rejected new ideas. Among other topics, the course will focus on the national path as a secular alternative to the collapse of the orthodox way of life on the one hand, and the rise of political Anti-Semitism on the other.


Secularization of Jewish Minorities in the Age of Nationalism in Eastern and Central Europe

Eastern and Central Europe were the main areas in which conflicts erupted between traditional – religious - ways of life and the modern and secular ones. The course will follow those clashes, and will try to understand the effects of Jewish nationalism and the influence of the European national ideas in the development of new and secular Jewish alternatives.


From "Tsene Urene" to the Core of Secular Judaism: Selected Issues in the History of Yiddish Culture during the 19-20 Centuries

The course will focus on the development of Yiddish culture from its earlier role as an agent of continuity within Jewish traditional life, until it became an ideological tool for the formation of Jewish secularism in the twentieth century.


Introduction to Ladino Culture

In this course we will look at the ways in which Sephardic Jewry faced the challenge of modernization by focusing on Ladino culture and its literary expressions as an agent of secularization.

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