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Secular Jewish culture embraces several related phenomena; above all, it is the culture of secular communities of Jewish people, but it can also include the cultural contributions of individuals who identify as secular Jews, or even those of religious Jews working in cultural areas not generally considered to be connected to religion.

The word secular in secular Jewish culture, therefore, refers not to the type of Jew but rather to the type of culture. For example, religiously observant Orthodox Jews who write literature and music or produce films with non-religious themes are participating in secular Jewish culture, even if they are not secular themselves.

However, Judaism guides its adherents in both practice and belief, and has been called not only a religion, but also a "way of life," which makes it difficult to draw a clear distinction between Judaism and Jewish culture. Furthermore, not all individuals or all cultural phenomena can be easily classified as either "secular" or "religious".

In many times and places, such as in the ancient Hellenic world, in Europe before and after the Enlightenment, and in the contemporary United States and Israel, cultural phenomena have developed that are in some sense characteristically Jewish without being at all specifically religious. Some factors in this come from within Judaism, others from the interaction of Jews with others around them, and others from the inner social and cultural dynamics of the community, as opposed to religion itself.

Origins of secular Jewish culture

For at least 2,000 years, there has not been a unity of Jewish culture. Jews were always geographically dispersed, so that by the 19th century the Ashkenazi Jews were mainly in Europe, especially Eastern Europe; the Sephardi Jews were largely spread among various communities in North Africa, Turkey, as well as various smaller communities in a diverse range of other locations, while Mizrahi Jews were primarily spread around the Arab world; and other populations of Jews were scattered in such places as Ethiopia the Caucasus, and India. (See Jewish ethnic divisions.) Many of these populations were cut off in some degree from the surrounding cultures by ghettoization, by the Muslim laws of dhimma, etc. By 1931, before the Holocaust, 92% of the world's Jewish population was Ashkenazi in origin, and therefore much of what is thought of as "Jewish culture" is the Jewish culture of Central and Eastern Europe.

Medieval Jewish communities in Eastern Europe developed distinct cultural traits over the centuries, but beginning with the Enlightenment (and its echo within Judaism in the Haskalah movement), many Yiddish-speaking Jews in Eastern Europe saw themselves as forming an ethnic or national group whose identity did not depend on religion. Constanin Măciucă writes of "a differentiated but not isolated Jewish spirit" permeating the culture of Yiddish-speaking Jews. This was only intensified as the rise of Romanticism increased the sense of national identity across Europe generally. Thus, for example, Bund members — that is, members of the General Jewish Labor Union 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 practising or believing Christian himself. 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. At the same time, pogroms in Eastern Europe created a migration, in large part to the United States, where 2 million Jewish immigrants arrived between 1880 and 1920. In the 1940s, The Holocaust resulted in the destruction of most of European Jewry, which, combined with the birth of Israel and the movement of Jews from Arab nations, created a further geographic shift. Defining secular culture among those who practice Judaism is difficult, because the entire culture is entwined with religious traditions. (This is particularly true of Orthodox Judaism.) Gary Tobin, head of the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, said of traditional Jewish culture:

The dichotomy between religion and culture doesn’t really exist. Every religious attribute is filled with culture; every cultural act filled with religiosity. Synagogues themselves are great centers of Jewish culture. After all, what is life really about? Food, relationships, enrichment hellip; So is Jewish life. So many of our traditions inherently contain aspects of culture. Look at the Passover Seder—it’s essentially great theater. Jewish education and religiosity bereft of culture is not as interesting.

Languages

:See main article Jewish languages. Literary and theatrical expressions of secular Jewish culture may be in specifically Jewish languages such as Hebrew, Yiddish or Ladino, or it may be in the language of the surrounding cultures, such as English or German. Secular literature and theater in Yiddish largely began in the 19th century and was in decline by the middle of the 20th century. The revival of Hebrew beyond its use in the liturgy is largely an early 20th-century phenomenon, and is closely associated with Zionism. Generally, whether a Jewish community will speak a Jewish or non-Jewish language as its main vehicle of discourse is dependent on how isolated or assimilated that community is. For example, the Jews in the shtetls of Poland and the Lower East Side of New York (during the early 20th century) spoke Yiddish at most times, while assimilated Jews in Germany during the 19th century or the United States today would or do speak German or English in general.

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