The UC Davis Program in Jewish Studies is pleased to be the recipient of a grant from the Posen Foundation to support a series of courses on secular Jewish culture. The grant will support four courses dedicated to an examination of different facets of secular Judaism and secular Jewish culture as they have developed throughout Jewish history.

Courses

Jewish Studies 10: Introduction to Religious and Secular Jewish Cultures
Current Syllabus
Instructor: David Biale

This course will examine the way Jewish cultures, starting with biblical literature, have always involved both religious and secular elements. By drawing on books of the Bible, such as the Song of Songs, the Book of Esther and Ecclesiastes, rabbinic midrash, rationalist medieval philosophy and the secular Hebrew poetry of Spain and juxtaposing them with more theologically and religiously based literature, students will come to understand how Judaism cannot be reduced to just a religion. The final section of the course will deal with the rise of modern secular Jewish cultures in Eastern Europe, Israel and America. One theme in this section will be how modern Jewish writers appropriated traditional religious themes for radically anti-religious and secular purposes. The foundational text for the course will be David Biale's edited volume, Cultures of the Jews, which will be supplemented with a course reader of primary sources.

Topics:

1. Biblical literature between religion and secularity
2. The end of prophecy: rabbinic traditions with and without God
3. Negative theology and medieval Jewish philosophy
4. The languages of love in medieval Hebrew poetry
5. Eastern European Jewish culture between ultra-orthodoxy and secularism
6. Modern Hebrew culture and the revolt against religion
7. American Jewish culture: is it religious or secular?

This course will trace the history of secular Jewish thought from Spinoza to the twentieth century. Some of the thinkers who will be considered, such as Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, rejected religion altogether, while others, including Spinoza, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, redefined religion and theology in new, often radically subversive ways. Finally, the course will also consider secular redefinitions of Judaism, such as that of Ahad Ha'am. Topics and readings:

1. Philosophical roots of secular Judaism: Ibn Ezra and Maimonides
   Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, Idolatry
2. Spinoza's critique of biblical religion
   Benedict Spinoza, Political Theological Treatise
3. Opium of the masses: Marx's assault on religion
   Karl Marx, Early Writings (including "On the Jewish Question")
4. The future of an illusion: Freud's psychological reduction of religion
   Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion
   Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism
5. Judaism as secular nationalism: Ahad Ha-am and M.Y. Berdichevsky
   Arthur Hertzberg, Zionist Idea
   Shlomo Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism
6. Between Secularism and Mysticism: Gershom Scholem's "Counter-History" of Judaism
   David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History
7. The Angel of History: Walter Benjamin's Secular Messianism
   Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
8. The Line Between Religion and Nihilism: Franz Kafka's Modernist Parables
   Franz Kafka, The Castle
   Franz Kafka, Parables
   Robert Alter, Necessary Angels

The transition from tradition to modernity in modern Jewish life has manifested itself in a number of different ways, often including serious challenges to and changes in traditional forms of Jewish practice, belief and identity, In this class we will explore the variety of Jewish movements, ideologies and pivotal thinkers that have emerged over the past two centuries, and been largely responsible for creating modern, secular expressions of Jewish culture, politics and identity. We will focus on the origins of modernization and secularization in the European Jewish world, looking at the Enlightenment and Emancipation of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, then we will concentrate on the major forms of secular Jewish culture that developed in the 19th and 20th centuries, including the many varieties of Jewish Socialism (e.g. Bundism) and Nationalism (e.g. Zionism), Hebrew and Yiddish Literature. We will also encounter some of the foundational figures of secular Jewish culture, such as Ahad Ha'Am, M. Y. Berdichevsky, Simon Dubnov, Chaim Zhitlovsky, and others.

Topics:

• Enlightenment and Emancipation in Western Europe
• Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism)
• Haskalah (Enlightenment) in Eastern Europe
• Jewish Political Radicalism: Socialism and Revolutionary Populism
• Jewish Nationalism: Zionism, Autonomism, Diaspora Nationalism
• Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature
• The Jewish Labor Movement in America
• Yidishkayt and the Klezmer Revival
• "Media Judaism": the Cultural Jew in America

Readings:
The Jew in the Modern World, Judah Reinharz and Paul Mendes-Flohr, eds.
The Zionist Idea, Arthur Hertzberg, ed.
The I.L. Peretz Reader, Ruth Wisse, ed.
Between Tradition and Modernity, David Weinberg
A Century of Ambivalence, Zvi Gitelman

Topics:

• Jewish Aniconism?
• Non-Jewish symbols in synagogue art
• Hebrew illuminated manuscripts: a Jewish art form?
• Art and acculturation in nineteenth-century Germany
• Art and Politics in the modern era
• The Holocaust and the limits of representation
• Is Abstraction Jewish?

Readings:
Richard Cohen, Jewish Icons
Steven Fine, Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World
Marc Epstein, Dreams of Subversion in Medieval Jewish Art and Literature
Margaret Olin, The Nation Without Art
Benjamin Harshav, Marc Chagall on Art and Culture