This, in combination with the creation of the State of Israel and the consequent Jewish exodus from Arab lands, resulted in a further geographic shift. During the 1940s, the Holocaust uprooted and destroyed most of the Jewish communities living in much of Europe. For these reasons, much of what is thought of by English-speakers and, to a lesser extent, by non-English-speaking Europeans as "secular Jewish culture" is, in essence, the Jewish cultural movement that evolved in Central and Eastern Europe, and subsequently brought to North America by immigrants.
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Secularism originated in Europe as series of movements that militated for a new, heretofore unheard-of concept called "secular Judaism". By 1931, shortly before The Holocaust, 92% of the World's Jewish population was Ashkenazi in origin. At the same time, pogroms in Eastern Europe provoked a surge of migration, in large part to the United States, where some 2 million Jewish immigrants resettled between 18. The Haskalah combined with the Jewish Emancipation movement under way in Central and Western Europe to create an opportunity for Jews to enter secular society.
Napoleon grants freedom to the Jews, herald of Jewish emancipation in Europe Thus, for example, members of the General Jewish Labour Bund in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were generally non-religious, and one of the historical leaders of the Bund was the child of converts to Christianity, though not a practicing or believing Christian himself. This was only intensified as the rise of Romanticism amplified the sense of national identity across Europe generally. Despite the universalist leanings of the Enlightenment (and its echo within Judaism in the Haskalah movement), many Yiddish-speaking Jews in Eastern Europe continued to see themselves as forming a distinct national group - " 'am yehudi", from the Biblical Hebrew - but, adapting this idea to Enlightenment values, they assimilated the concept as that of an ethnic group whose identity did not depend on religion, which under Enlightenment thinking fell under a separate category.Ĭonstantin Măciucă writes of the existence of "a differentiated but not isolated Jewish spirit" permeating the culture of Yiddish-speaking Jews.
Medieval Jewish communities in Eastern Europe continued to display distinct cultural traits over the centuries. (See Jewish ethnic divisions.)Īlthough there was a high degree of communication and traffic between these Jewish communities - many Sephardic exiles blended into the Ashkenazi communities which existed in Central Europe following the Spanish Inquisition many Ashkenazim migrated to the Ottoman Empire, giving rise to the characteristic Syrian-Jewish family name "Ashkenazi" Iraqi-Jewish traders formed a distinct Jewish community in India to some degree, many of these Jewish populations were cut off from the cultures which surrounded them by ghettoization, Muslim laws of dhimma, and the traditional discouragement of contact between Jews and members of polytheistic populations by their religious leaders. Since then Israelite populations were always geographically dispersed (see Jewish diaspora), so that by the 19th century the Ashkenazi Jews were mainly located in Eastern and Central Europe the Sephardi Jews were largely spread among various communities which lived in the Mediterranean region Mizrahi Jews were primarily spread throughout Western Asia and other populations of Jews lived in Central Asia, Ethiopia, the Caucasus, and India.
There has not been a political unity of Jewish society since the united monarchy. Tombstones from a Jewish cemetery, 13th century, Paris
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