Secularization in Modern Jewish Thought

This article discusses the main challenges that secularization presented to Judaism and to Jewish thought, and maps the key strategies and central thinkers who responded to this challenge, from the eighteenth century up to the turn of the twenty-first. Attention is also given to some secular theologies, to Zionist thinkers embracing secularization, and to the challenges of post-Holocaust Jewish theology. In particular, the entry highlights the frequent questioning of a religious/secular divide that figures within modern Jewish thought. In the dominant European context of Western secularization, it argues that eighteenth-century Hasidism effectively opposed the creation of separate secular and religious spheres, and it presents a view of Hasidic and other Orthodox leaders as modern thinkers whose engagement with secularism included openness to key secular notions. In addition, paying attention to responses to secularization within Sephardi Jewry, who lived among Muslim-majority societies primarily in North Africa and the Middle East, the entry suggests that Sephardi rabbis viewed Judaism as an inclusive whole, and tacitly rejected an assumed division of Judaism into religious and secular elements. Finally, the entry also claims that, for key modern Jewish theologians, the secular served as a theological category that is employed within projects of criticism of ‘religion’. For such thinkers, secularization then becomes a step, and even a foundation stone, for broader spiritual, religious, and even messianic global futures.