While religion undeniably became a central pillar of Jewish identity following the exile, the foundation of Jewish history is inherently national. The focus on land, peoplehood, and sovereignty is not incidental; it is fundamental
A recent study by the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) found that “a large majority of secular Israeli Jews attach importance to their Jewish identity, and most express a strong sense of Jewishness.” When respondents were asked to rate, on a scale of 1 to 10, the degree to which they “feel Jewish,” the weighted result obtained for all secular Israeli Jews was on average 8.5 out of 10.
When people speak of Israeli secularism, they often do so in the language of abstract ideals—cosmopolitanism, personal freedom, entrepreneurial energy. These principles echo the spirit of the 21st century and easily align with global democratic norms. Yet they rarely capture what is particular about the secular identity that emerged in Israel. Because Israeli secularism is not merely a negation of faith or tradition. It is not a vacuum filled by Western liberalism. It is the product of a deeply Jewish legacy.
Secular Israelis, far from floating in a sea of postmodern detachment, are often anchored—consciously or not—in the historical and cultural inheritance of the Jewish people. This inheritance is neither purely religious nor fully national in the conventional sense. It is something else: a civilizational memory passed through language, literature, ethics, and the haunting persistence of peoplehood.
In a 2017 Haaretz article, Ram Fruman explored the roots of this secular consciousness, rightly tracing it back to the Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah, which swept through Eastern and Central Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. But his interpretation stops short. He depicts the Haskalah largely as a revolt against halacha and God, a rationalist embrace of Western modernity. That is only part of the story.
The Maskilim—those who led the Haskalah—were not simply aspiring to become “citizens of the world.” They sought something more specific and paradoxical: a Jewish enlightenment. Their ideal was not to dissolve into the gentile majority but to construct a Jewish identity rooted in culture, language, and memory, rather than religious law. They were heirs to the idea later captured by the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini: that the path to universalism runs through the particular, that to be truly human one must first belong to a people.
It’s no accident that Heinrich Graetz, the pioneering Jewish historian, began his monumental History of the Jewish Peoplenot with Sinai or divine revelation but with the conquest of the land under Joshua. For Graetz, Judaism was not merely a faith. It was the expression of a people with a homeland, a language, and a destiny. Religion mattered—but only as one expression of a national continuity.
The Haskalah, then, was not simply a philosophical rebellion. It was a cultural revolution. It reclaimed the Hebrew language—not as a frozen relic for prayer and scripture, but as a living, creative medium. In the cities of Eastern Europe, Hebrew was revived for poetry, journalism, political thought. Maskilim translated the classics of world literature into Hebrew. They launched newspapers and literary journals that crossed borders and ideological lines, giving shape to a new, transnational Jewish intelligentsia.
This cultural ferment helped reframe Jewish self-understanding. The Bible, for instance, was no longer read solely as divine law but also as national epic. It became Judaism’s Iliad—an origin story that offered moral wisdom, shared symbols, and a sense of rootedness. In Hebrew schools from Vilna to Jaffa, it was taught not as a catechism but as literature: the formative text of a people with a history.
This legacy would become foundational for Zionism. Figures like Ahad Ha’am, Bialik, and ultimately Herzl and Ben-Gurion, inherited not just the content of the Haskalah but its underlying proposition: that Jewish renewal could be achieved through cultural and political sovereignty. That one could be secular and still deeply Jewish—not in defiance of history, but because of it.
And in Herzl’s Altneuland, we find something else still more unique: a political vision not fixated on conquest or return alone, but on the nature of the society that Jews would build after statehood. Altneuland is less a manifesto than a blueprint for a liberal, pluralistic Jewish society. No other national movement, to my knowledge, placed such emphasis not just on founding a state, but on imagining its moral fabric after victory.
That vision endures in unexpected ways. It explains, for example, the mass resistance to Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul even before October 7. It also explains the public outrage after the far-right’s assault on the Sde Teiman base, widely seen as a dangerous breach of democratic order. In both cases, what’s being defended is not just a set of institutions, but an idea of Israel rooted in secular democratic Zionism.
Critics of secularism often accuse it of lacking depth, of offering no counterweight to the moral clarity of religious tradition. But this ignores the existential role secularism plays for millions. Many do not reject religion because of complex metaphysical arguments; they simply find their identity and security elsewhere. Religion, for them, is not primarily about theology. It is about belonging. And that, too, is what secularism offers—when it remembers its own story.
The tragedy is that in recent decades, Israeli secularism has forgotten how to tell that story. It has focused on policies rather than identity, on electoral tactics rather than civilizational purpose. It has ceded the moral high ground to those who speak in the name of God, forgetting that it, too, is rooted in texts, memory, and meaning.
Now, in the wake of national trauma and growing extremism, a window has opened. Israeli secularism—culturally and politically—has a rare chance to reassert itself not just as a negation of theocracy, but as a coherent identity. One that can speak to the heart of the Israeli condition, not just to its global aspirations. It must do more than ask for votes. It must say, with confidence: This is who we are. This is the tradition we carry. And this is the country we still intend to build.