There is a fear of Judaism in Israeli culture, rooted in the concern that the Jewish religion will threaten and potentially eliminate secular Israeli identity, writes Gideon Katz (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Sede-Boker, Israel) in Israel Affairs (30:4). Katz adopts a phenomenological approach to analyze Israeli literary works, including essays, critiques, and dystopian novels, to understand the consciousness and experiences of the secular sector.
The fear manifests as concern that secularism is merely a temporary historical episode that will be supplanted by religious Judaism. With the rise of religious political parties and secular Jews turning to religion, dystopian novels from the 1980s onward depict Israel transforming into a dark, violent theocracy. They present secular identity as fragile and vulnerable to religious takeover. The anxieties expressed in these dystopian novels are echoed in other forms of cultural discourse, such as newspaper columns and academic studies. Katz explains that secular intellectuals view Judaism as integral to Israeli identity yet also threatening to it. The fear reflects a broader tension between “Israeliness” (modern secular identity) and traditional Judaism, with roots that predate the founding of the State of Israel.
Katz argues that the identity crisis experienced by secular Israelis has both metaphysical and cultural causes. The metaphysical cause is rooted in the limitations of secularism as a basis for collective identity and social meaning-making. The cultural cause is linked to the specific context of Israeli culture and its historical relationship with Judaism. Katz contends that the dominant conception of Judaism as a national culture in Israeli secularism has led to an alienation from the religious foundations of Judaism. He suggests that overcoming this fear requires developing new ways of engaging with Jewish tradition that are neither purely secular nor traditionally religious, avoiding both isolationism and messianic nationalism. Katz calls for moving beyond the Ashkenazi-dominated secular-religious divide—the legacy of the secular Zionist rebellion among the Jews of Europe—and opening to the less dichotomous approach of Mizrahi Jews (with ancestral origins in the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Asia), with its “continuous, intimate, and flexible connection to the religious tradition.”
(Israel Affairs, https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/fisa20/current)
